You must reserve a tape drive before you can use it for other purposes as Netbackup scan the drives from time to time. I think the netbackup command tpreq command can do the job. It allow mounting a tape for non Netbackup use. The command require root privileges, but creating a SUDO job should solve that issue.
You use command "tpunmount" to dismount the tape drive.
NAME
tpreq--request a tape volume for mounting and assign a file name to the drive
SYNOPSIS
/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/tpreq -m media_id [-a accessmode] [-d density] [-p poolname] [-f] filename
DESCRIPTION
This command initiates a mount request for a tape volume on a removable media device. The information that
you specify with this command identifies and registers the specified file as a logical identifier for the
mount request with Media Manager. It also manages access to the volume.
Media Manager automatically mounts the media if it is in a robotic drive. Otherwise, an operator mount
request appears in the Device Monitor window. tpreq does not complete normally in the case of a mount request
for a robotic drive, if operator intervention is required. These requests also appear in the Device Monitor
window.
When the operation is complete, use tpunmount to unmount the volume and remove the file name from the direcâ
tory in which the file was created.
When a tpreq command is initiated, a call is made to the script drive_mount_notify immediately after the
media is successfully placed in a pre-selected drive. This script allows user special handling to occur now.
Control is then returned to tpreq to resume processing. The script is only called from the tpreq command for
the drives that are in robots and is not valid for stand-alone drives. This script resides in the
/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/goodies directory. To use this script, activate it and copy it into the
/usr/openv/volmgr/bin directory; usage information is documented within the script.
The following applies only to NetBackup Enterprise Server:
If you request optical disk densities (odiskwm or odiskwo), tpreq acts differently than with sequential tape
devices. The logical file name is a link to the data partition of the disk device. By default, it is the
character device. tpformat labels optical platters with the volume-header partition being the label and the
data partition being the rest of the disk.
You must have root privileges to run this command.
Example from the command manual:
Example 1
The following command creates a file named tape1 in the current working
directory. It links the file to the drive that contains the volume that has media ID
of JLR01. The access mode for the tape file is set to write, and a 1/4-inch
cartridge drive is assigned.
# tpreq -f tape1 -m jlr01 -a w -d qscsi