Greetings,
 
We have multiple IBM3584s, and have tried both TSM managed tape
cleaning, and automatic tape cleaning via ALMS, with 3592 tape drives. 
With TSM managed tape cleaning, we were having a lot of problems with
TSM getting tape errors and failed tape drives.  We also found that TSM
did not perform a cleaning every time the tape drive asked for one.  In
other words, TSM did not consistently respond to every cleaning request,
which probably accounted for our failed tape drive situation.
 
We turned on ALMS and automatic tape cleaning.  Our cleanings went up
quite a bit at first, then settled down.  The tape drive failures
tapered off.  
 
I can hardly believe a field service guy from IBM telling Jim he should
only clean tape drives "when absolutely necessary".  How would Jim
decide when it was "absolutely necessary"?  When he was trying to
recover a production database at 4 am and every tape he mounted was
unreadable and he couldn't recover the data?  The tape drive firmware
automatically detects when it needs to be cleaned.  What sense does it
make to ignore that functionality and think you can guess for yourself
what the drive really needs?
 
The cleaning tapes cost $50.  But the data on the tapes might have cost
millions to produce.  Why take such a risk?


Best Regards,

John D. Schneider
The Computer Coaching Community, LLC
Office: (314) 635-5424 / Toll Free: (866) 796-9226
Cell: (314) 750-8721

 
 
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Ejecting cleaning cartridges from the TS3500/3584
From: "Prather, Wanda" <wPrather AT ICFI DOT COM>
Date: Wed, March 17, 2010 2:23 pm
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU

These are TS1130 drives/3592 cartridges, which certainly appear to be
cleaning more often than LTO3/4's do.
We have the library set to autoclean, which means it inserts the
cleaning cart only when the drives request a cleaning.

This lib has 4 drives, averaging about 1.5-2 TB migration, + 1.5-2 2 TB
backup stgpool, + reclaims daily, ~2000 mounts a day.
Using about 1 cleaning cart (50 cleans) a month.
Don't know if that's a lot or a little, in terms of cleaning, for
TS1130's.


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Jim Zajkowski
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 2:57 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Ejecting cleaning cartridges from the TS3500/3584

On 3/17/10 1:18 PM, "Prather, Wanda" <wPrather AT ICFI DOT COM> wrote:

> Is there a way to make the TS3500/3584 do that? ALMS is enabled,
> multiple partitions, 3592 carts.

I certainly don't have a robot that big, but in seven years we've only
cleaned the drives a handful of times. Am I doing something wrong? Our
field service guy suggested that we only clean them when absolutely
necessary because repeated cleaning can cause the head to fail.

--Jim