Laura,

I'm thinking 30,000 write passes is a pretty long life for a tape - you may
want to see if that's mounts instead.

Yes, it can, with one caveat: if you are using scratch tapes, when the
volume returns to scratch status, the counter is reset.  You would have to
checkin the tapes as private and assign them to your storage pools
manually, and this doesn't work as easily on a copypool (it can be done,
you just have to work at it more).

I'm not sure if any of the TSM monitoring tools out there will track this
for you, but if you can do any perl programming (or other scripting
language), or have someone around who can do it for you, you could write a
script that goes out and counts the mount messages (or defines to a storage
pool) from the TSM actlog and keeps track of them by volser.

Nick Cassimatis
nickpc AT us.ibm DOT com

Think twice, type once.




                      Laura Buckley
                      <buckley@storsol.        To:       ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST 
DOT EDU
                      com>                     cc:
                      Sent by: "ADSM:          Subject:  Can the volume write 
pass value be used to track media life?
                      Dist Stor
                      Manager"
                      <[email protected]
                      .EDU>


                      04/17/2003 12:45
                      AM
                      Please respond to
                      buckley






Hi,

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.

TIA

Laura Buckley
STORServer, Inc.
buckley AT storserver DOT com