>I'm seeing what looks like excessive drive cleaning on our 3590 tape
>drives.
...
>Is anyone else seeing this?  Is it a problem w/ the drive firmware perhaps?

If you've been on the same firmware for some time and only now are seeing
the high rates of cleaning, then the tape drive believes that its head is
dirty.  There is no way to "know" if your drive head is actually clean without
microscopic analysis.  Dry cleaning may make the IBM CE feel confident that
the head has been cleaned, but it's not necessarily.  More experienced CEs
will perform a wet cleaning of the head (remember 3420 maintenance procedures?),
which I can say from experience can render a problematic 3590 drive
problem-free.  Those younger-and-cheaper CEs just don't have the experience.
    Richard Sims, BU