ADSM-L

Re: Interesting LTO fault's symptom

2003-06-24 09:01:56
Subject: Re: Interesting LTO fault's symptom
From: Leonard Lauria <Leonard AT UKY DOT EDU>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:52:54 -0400
According to a memo I received from IBM, the LTO 
drives do NOT require periodic cleaning. 

The only time ours got cleaned is when we noticed
that auto cleaning was not occuring, and before we
got the memo.

Now, we have had a few tapes stuck in drives for
various reasons, and many unexplained I/O errors,
though I am begining to suspect SAN backups as the
root cause and not the LTO drives.

leonard


-----Original Message-----
From: "Thach, Kevin" <KThach AT COVHLTH DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:35:39 -0400
Subject: Re: Interesting LTO fault's symptom

Same situation here.  We have a 3584 with 12 drives that have been in use
for about a year.  We pump about a Terabyte of data through them everyday,
and our cleaning tape has been used twice in the past year.  We have had
numerous tapes get stuck in drives, and had to have IBM come out and take
the drives apart to get the tapes out, but we have not had a read or write
error on a single tape as of yet.

I've spoken to our IBM engineer about the cleaning frequency and she was
surprised also.  Next time I talk to her I might ask her to research it a
little more for me.

I also noticed there is a CLEANFREQUENCY parameter that can be set at the
drive level within TSM.  All of our drives are set to NONE.  I wonder if
setting this to ASNEEDED would cause them to be cleaned more frequently.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Longo [mailto:David.Longo AT HEALTH-FIRST DOT ORG] 
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 8:59 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Interesting LTO fault's symptom


Interesting.  I have had an IBM 3584 library with
(8) LTO1 drives, FC attached for over a year with
no problem.  Cleaning tape was installed initially
and autoclean turned on on the library.  Tape has not
been used yet!.  I backup nearly 700GB of data
a day and make offsite copies.  Don't do a lot
of restores. I started with 100 tapes in system
and now have 220.

I remember a thread some months ago - maybe a year
about cleaning.  Everybody then commented that 
their cleaning tapes weren't getting used either.

Anybody know what should be a "reasonable" use
of the cleaning tape?


David B. Longo
System Administrator
Health First, Inc.
3300 Fiske Blvd.
Rockledge, FL 32955-4305
PH      321.434.5536
Pager  321.634.8230
Fax:    321.434.5509
david.longo AT health-first DOT org

>>> DFosdike AT ELDERS.COM DOT AU 06/23/03 20:14 PM >>>
Greeting TSMers,

I have read this thread with great interest as we seem to have similar
symptoms on the same kind of equipement.  IBM are confounded at present but
are starting to come to the same conclusion as me that the autoclean
symptom on the library is not functioning as it should.  We originally put
this down to TSM having control of the cleaning tapes but have now resolved
this and cleaning is still not happening.  We use our drives (3 of them)
18-20 hours a day and the last cleaning was a manual one we did 3 months
ago!   The IBM engineer said he surprised it still works at all.  We have
thrown out 5 tapes (from a library of 110) over the last 15 months which we
now believe may not have been faulty at all, just victims of a dirty drive!
There is another thread related to the same errors (1117 etc) listed in this
list back in February which leads me to the same conclusions.  If IBM come
up with a solution I will post it here.

 David Fosdike
 Senior Technical Specialist
 Elders Limited
 08 8425 4565
 0417 714 467
 '...despise not the day of small things...'
 


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tomáš Hrouda Ing. [mailto:throuda AT HTD DOT CZ]
>Sent: Monday, 16 June 2003 9:44 PM
>To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>Subject: Interesting LTO fault's symptom
>
>
>Hi all,
>
>during last weeks I did interesting findings at one of production LTO 
>3583-L18 library. There are 2 drives and both was changed past series 
>of media faults (one of them twice) past about 1 year of
>operation. We have
>about 20 "historicaly touched" tapes with average 3-4 write 
>faults. Media
>faults are still repeated and my finding is all that faults 
>were done at
>70-75% of estimated capacity (set by longterm using to 105GB, 
>we use client
>compression) during filling the tape. It seems like all tapes 
>were corrupted
>nearly at the same place, of course there is some diffusion 
>because this is
>only estimated filling. Faults at these tapes are repeatedly occured at
>these percents of max capacity.
>
>I understand when one tape has media fault repeatedly at the
>same place, but
>about 20 tapes? Could it mean that all tapes were corrupted by 
>one bad drive
>at the same place, or can be reason at microcode?
>
>We are in contact with our IBM support to solve it, but I am
>interested if
>anybody of you register similar phenomenon?
>
>Tomas
>

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