Monitoring DLT Drives

[pmwut5]

I have a Storage Silo 9730 and would like to know more information about then 10 DLT 7000 drives within the Silo.

I have heard of a piece of software from Storage Tech that will monitor the silo via a mib. Has anybody used any other software.

I am interested in knowing when drives need cleaning, error rate, phyical backup peformance etc. I know the silo can be configured for automatical cleaning but this can be problematic. Any info on your exeriences would be helpful

Regards

 

[sdeb]

There could be some conflicts problem when using cleaning based on library configuration (software don't always support it).
You should better user software cleaning configuration, the problem is that the library will really know when the tape needs a cleaning wheras the software will use a cleaning interval that you specify (so it sometimes launch a cleaning when the drive don't need it).

So the best way to configure the cleaning frequency (in LEGATO) is to see (for the first time) when your drive ask for cleaning (on the library panel) but you can configure it by default to one week for example (dont' clean your drives to often because it not good for em).
Or simply ask to LEGATO if they support STK automatic cleaning.
I personnally use LEGATO cleaning frequency (not necessarly the best).

Error rate is really difficult to know and varies on many factors, values given by contructors are not true (to my opinion).

Each of your DLT7K drive has the following performance:

5 MB/S native capacity
10 MB/S compressed (2:1)
Compression nearly depends on the same factors than for compression software. Troughput varies for example on the size of the files your backing up.

The global performance of your silo will depend on your SCSI configuration, number of drive per adapter...

Hope this helps.

 

[TDun]

If you add the nsrperf (assuming this is NT) then you can use Windows performance monitor to monitor usage.
I would agree with the previous comment re: the cleaning, but to expand,
either leave it to the silo (if the 9730 is shared by several servers) or set it in Networker.