Use the library.

We had a 3584 with 10 SCSI LTO-1 drives for 3 years, then upgraded to a
new library with 10 (now 16) LTO-2 drives. We put in 4 cleaning tapes
with the initial tape load on the first library. Six years later, and
ONE cleaning tape shows 11 mounts. And all 11 were manually instigated
in the first year of the first library, to check out drives after
maintenance in the early versions of the LTO-1 microcode.

I've seen maybe 8 to 10 SCSI error messages indicating cleaning required
over the years, and all have cleared by the time of the tape dismount
(LTO was supposed to be self-cleaning; looks like it really is).

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Larry Peifer
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 8:15 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: IBM 3584 Tape Cleaning

Those of you who have the IBM 3584 tape libraries - please weigh in on
pros/cons of using either the Automatic Cleaning method of the host
library or the Tape cleaning management method of the TSM server.  We
are
configuring  two 3584's to replace our four 3583 libraries.  Our
environment is TSM 5.3x server on AIX  5.3 with LTO2 drives and LTO2
tapes
in the libraries with each library configured as it's own single
partition.
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