These procedures address the questions, “Am I likely to need more media, drives, or storage cells next year? If so, how many?”

The criteria for determining whether drives or media need replacement varies by site.

For drives, STA tracks many applicable criteria — in particular, several “drive lifetime” measures, such as Drive Lifetime Loads, Drive Lifetime Meters, and Drive Lifetime Power Hours. See “Report Percent Drive Utilization”, below, for one example.

For media, STA provides data that is useful in a variety of scenarios, including the following:

Referenced Tasks

The first graph on the screen is “% Drive Utilization,” which displays the system average of percent drive utilization over time. This provides a high-level measure of activity for all drives in your environment.

In the example below, the table is sorted in descending order of “% Drive Utilization (30 Days)” — highest percentage utilization first.

Adding the drives to the graphs allows you to compare their attribute values against the system average.

The drives are added to the graphs.

The screen provides a high-level view of the number of media cartridges, aggregated by type.

The example below illustrates a site planning to migrate off older generation LTO2 and LTO3 tapes. Moving the mouse over these two sections of the pie chart reveals there are a total of 27 LTO2 and 64 LTO3 tapes that must be replaced.

The example below shows the screen filtered for LTO2 media. On this screen, you can organize the media records by remaining capacity, physical location, or other attributes pertinent to the migration process.

This template includes a filter and attributes related to media that have expired and should be retired from service.