Tape drive cleaning

Check frequency setting for each drive first. Can you post output of commands below?

# tpclean -L
# tpconfig -emm_dev_list

Also, check your library and drives from management tool whether it really requst cleaning.

Here are the requested outputs:

F:\Veritas\Volmgr\bin>tpclean.exe -L
Drive Name              Type      Mount Time  Frequency   Last Cleaned         Comment
**********              ****      **********  *********   ****************     *******
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.009    hcart2*   374.8       0           17:27 01/03/2012     NEEDS CLEANING
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.008    hcart2*   129.1       0           18:23 01/16/2012     NEEDS CLEANING
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.007    hcart2*   452.3       0           16:51 01/03/2012     NEEDS CLEANING
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.006    hcart2*   457.4       0           16:42 01/03/2012     NEEDS CLEANING
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.002    hcart2*   0.0         0           00:03 01/26/2012
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.004    hcart2*   110.9       0           12:38 01/19/2012
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.003    hcart2*   9.6         0           00:02 01/26/2012     NEEDS CLEANING
HP.ULTRIUM5-SCSI.005    hcart2*   303.2       0           18:42 01/10/2012     NEEDS CLEANING

Second output is attached.

And can you let me know what is management tool. Do you mean library console?

NetBackup 7.1Administrator's Guide for Windows Volume II , page 123
NetBackup reports that a drive needs cleaning if either of the following conditions
are true:
■ The value for the mount time is greater than the cleaning frequency.
■ The TapeAlert CLEAN_NOW or CLEAN_PERIODIC flag is set.
And either of the following conditions must be true:
■ The drive is a standalone drive and a cleaning tape is not defined.
■ The drive is a standalone drive and no cleaning tape has any cleanings that
remain.

Try to set Cleaning Frequency for each drive. Setting too short frequency is harmful, it's better to set it to thousands of hours.
Setting loger frequency is not problem. In situation that cleaning is really required, tape drive request cleaning by tape alert, and request based cleaning will be scheduled while mount time does not reach frequency.

And for now, to clear NEED CLEANING flag, run "tpclean -M <drive_name>" so that it reset mount time.

I do not agree with Frequency cleaning.

I believe that the default TapeAlert should be used.

Frequent cleaning requests is normally a result of slow throughput.

Some Cleaning TN's:

 http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH19399

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH37409.

See http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO56118 for explanation of cleaning TapeAlert messages.

Hello, Marianne.
I agree with you, short frequency is harmful. But also I think frequency of tens of thousand is substantially equal to disableing frequency base cleaning.
For veterans here, NEEDS CLEANINGS is not matter(judge with mount time and error log). But I would like to tell him how to avoid this flag.
 

From your figures this looks like a fairly new tape library to me - mount time of 0 hours on one drive and 9.6 on another, but still only 450 hours at most (19 days constant use)

That being the case it could be one of 3 things:

1. New drives no longer go through a cleaning cycle before being shipped due to the cost - so sacrifice some cleaning tapes and run three cleaning against each drive to see if it resolves it for you (this is what used to happen before manufacturer cut backs)

2. As they are LTO5 and the library is new I am guessing that they are also new tapes - in that case they may not be the best quality and may be making the situation worse - take a look at the RAS tickets on the tape library to see how many tape and drive alerts are present on it and what they are - it is worth paying the extra for really good tapes!

3. You have have a bad batch of tape drives (very common these days unfortunately) - raise a case with Quantum and get them all upgraded to the latest firmware and insist on sending them a library snapshot (you do this via the library web GUI) for examination. They may ask you to run the HP Tape tools on the drives as well - it is worth doing. In one environment I manage we have replaced at least 22 out of 18 HP drives so far (yes - some have been repalced at least twice!) - get a case logged and make the most of your warranty.

Hope this helps

Regarding Marks post above, specifically (2).

What make are the tapes (this can be seen in bptm log at VERBOSE = 5).

I'm going to hazard a guess here ...  that this is perfectly normal ' Drives are real busy ..."  - Well they'll need cleaning then ...  But first, I must ask ...

" I dont think that it should be so frequently ..."

Why not - how long has this system been busy ?  Has the amount of tape cleaning requests increased ?

Cheers,

Martin

customer of ours had the same kind of problem

One drive kept asking for a clean every 1 or 2 days, when we looked into this, it was the tape drive what was at fault, had the drive replacement and problem was fix.

My opinion is if the library and drives can manage their own cleaning, then get NetBackup out of the hardware business.  I've been told by several techs that hardware cleaning is the preferred method.