Hello TSMers,
I've been getting messages like the following on several drives and for
several cartridges:
06/28/06 10:16:58 ANR8948S Device /dev/rmt/16m, volume 205975 has issued
the following Critical TapeAlert: The tape just unloaded could not write
its system area successfully: 1. Copy data to another tape cartridge. 2.
Discard the old cartridge. (SESSION: 4514)
06/28/06 10:16:58 ANR8948S Device /dev/rmt/16m, volume 205975 has issued
the following Critical TapeAlert: The operation has failed because the
media cannot be loaded and threaded. 1. Remove the cartridge, inspect it as
specified in the product manual, and retry the operation. 2. If the problem
persists, call the tape drive supplier help line. (SESSION: 4514)
We have been having more and more drive and tape problems over the last six
months or so, after a couple years of solid performance. I'm trying to
figure out the root cause or causes. I suspected drives, because I also
saw write errors on specific drives... we swapped them out, and it seemed
better for a while... now I don't see the write errors, but I see the
messages above.
Some clues... these seem to be occurring only on recently purchased, new
tapes. We did change vendors about a year ago to get better pricing. I
have to collect some stats on how many tapes have problems, but my guess is
only a dozen or so among the 4000 tapes we purchased over the past year
from this vendor. The only other thing I can think of is changing the
library to autolabel. Oh, and we upgraded from TSM 5.2 to 5.3 in April
'06.
Is this a tape problem (bad batch or low quality), or a drive or library
problem?
My environment:
TSM 5.3.2.0 on HP-UX 11i. Big server (HP rp7410, 8 CPU, 12GB RAM, HP
XP512 RAID5 disk)
Five TSM servers on this box -- one library manager, four data handlers.
The errors above are in the library manager's activity log.
STK L700 library w/ six DLT7000 (not being used) and 14 IBM LTO2. 618
slots, library is usually full. We have about 3000 tapes onsite.
Library is doing tape cleaning, one universal cleaning tape in the library.
Sometimes I see Tapealerts saying the cleaning tape is not data grade...
was TSM trying to write to it? Should we let TSM do the cleaning instead?
TIA
Robin Sharpe
Berlex Labs
|
