> I have a customer who must prove to a governing agency that they are
> adequately tracking media life.  They are using AIT-3 media which SONY
> says has a lifecycle of 30,000 uses and a shelf life of approximately 30
> years.  So - in order to comply with their regulations, they must show
> that they are tracking the uses.  Does the value in the field called
> Write Pass Number in the volume record equate to what the manufacturer
> considers "uses"?  I believe this to mean a complete write pass from
> beginning to end of media.

The following is cut and pasted from the output of a 'help query volume'
command on our OS/390 5.1.6.2 server:

Write Pass Number (sequential access volumes only)
     The number of times the volume has been written to from the beginning
     to the end.

In OS/390 environments, the write pass number is essentially meaningless
for tapes obtained from scratch pools; the number is reset to zero each
time a tape is taken from a scratch pool and allocated to a storage pool.
The OS/390 server is unusual in that tape management services are mostly
provided by the host operating system rather than the TSM server itself.
I don't know whether write pass counting for scratch tapes works the
same way under other operating systems.

The 'query volume' output on our system also includes a 'Number of Times
Mounted' field. This might be more in line with Sony's idea of 'uses'.