Configuration of a physical control unit to support multiple logical control units for different tape drive types in a mainframe native tape attachment storage system

A computer program product for communication between a host and a plurality of tape drives of different types via a single physical control unit (CU), by a processor device, the computer program product embodied on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable program code portions stored therein, the computer-readable program code portions comprising:

• an executable portion that provides a plurality of model types L of tape drives, each said model type being of a different generation, and a number of tape drives QL for each model type;
• an executable portion that issues feature codes for a plurality N of logical control units (LCUs) for a customer for the single physical CU;
• an executable portion that enters the feature codes into the physical CU to enable configuration of N LCUs;
• an executable portion that configures the physical CU to support N LCUs, each LCU supporting communication with a single model type and a maximum of M tape drives;
• an executable portion that, based on the number of model types L and the number of tape drives for each model type QL, maps the model types to the N LCUs with priority given in the mapping to the newer generation model types and the model types where QL is greater than M;
• and
• an executable portion that assigns individual tape drives to the LCUs based on model type.