IBM 3584 Library - Excessive Cleaning

[Scott_Gunelius]

Has anyone encountered issues where they saw excessive cleaning of their LTO3 drives? We've got an IBM 3584 with twelve ULT3580-TD3 (Ultrium-TD3) drives that is SAN-attached and we use Imation media. We're burning through cleaning media like there's no tomorrow. As an example; one drive with only 2427 "Power on hours" has been cleaned 49 times while another drive with 8240 hours has been cleaned 54 times.

We're running NBU 5.0, MP6 and according to the HCL; the library, drives and associated firmware are all supported. If we were seeing this on all of the drives I would be more suspicious of the media, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Any ideas?

Thank you.

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Which of your cleaing type did you configured, library-based cleaning, frequency-based cleaning or tapealert-based cleaning?
If you configured as frequency-based, check wether cleaning frequency is too short. Or if you configured as other two types, there may be something wrong with robot or drive. Are there any difference - firmware revision or so on - between these drives?

[zippy]

Scott,

Take a look at this link...

http://forums.veritas.com/discussions/thread.jspa?messageID=4416808�

A short chunk of it says...

After 15 years of working with backups/tape drives amongst other things, in my experiance I would never clean tape drives once a week in fact I clean them maybe once every 6 months, the reason is because, the substance on the cleaning tapes strips the pickup area of the tape head right the heck off. To be blunt and in laymans terms I would turn off any automated tape cleaning thats is configured and do it manually when you feel up to it.


Dont set you tape drives to be cleaned on "auto" or via netbackup, do it manually. Trust me it woks and I am sure you will have NO Problems with you drives, other than a REAL failed one now and again.



JD

[Stumpr2]

Unfortunately many cleaning programs trigger on read/write errors from the tape drive and schedule a cleaning accordingly. The problem is that any I/O error could trigger this event and result in way too many cleanings. Check drive mappings on ALL of the SSO servers along with drivers/versions on all associated hardware.BS

[Derek_Black_2]

As best practise, I only clean the drives (and then manually) only when the HARDWARE says to clean them. NetBackup doesn't always know best.

[Chia_Tan_Beng]

Scott,

Any update? Having such a frequent drive cleaning must have something fundamentally incorrect (either driver or configuration). Have you perform those check as recommended by Yasuhisa?

TapeAlert is another option you may wnat to explore. However, you need to resolve this problem first before deciding which type of cleaning method is more appropriate for you.

[Doug_Klein]

Where do you set library-based cleaning? I also have an IBM 3584 ATL and I'll see messages in the Windows event logs that a media server is trying to clean a drive but can't find a tape.

[zippy]

library base cleaning is done through the web for your library.

I would turn all cleaning OFF

And

Clean them once every 6 months or so.

http://forums.veritas.com/discussions/thread.jspa?messageID=4416808攨

JD