Use STA to Answer Common Tape Environment Questions
Use STA to help answer common questions about the performance of the library system and the state of drives and media.
| Typical Question | Task |
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Which drives and media have had the most errors in the last 30 days? Are there any correlations between the two? |
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Which drives have had the most errors this week? Have their error rates gone up? |
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Which drives have had significantly declining efficiency over time? |
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Is the drive that failed twice today the same one that caused problems two months ago? |
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At 9:00 am today, one of our tape jobs experienced an error. Which drive and media were involved? Have they also experienced other errors? |
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What critical errors were reported to STA last month? Is the total number trending up, down, or staying stable? |
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How many libraries, drives, or media are in my tape system environment? How many drives or media of a particular type are in my tape system environment? |
Determine Number of Libraries, Drives, or Media in the System |
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Which are the top three drives in terms of utilization? |
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Which types of media are in short supply? Do I have an oversupply of any type? |
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Am I likely to need more media, drives, or storage cells next year? If so, how many? |
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Which types of drives or media are used the most in my tape system? |
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Which library in my tape environment is the busiest? Which is the least busy? |
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Which media are over 90 percent full? How do I generate a list that can be used to create a script to eject them from the library? |
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Have all my drives been upgraded to the latest firmware? |
Best Practices for Investigating Tape Environment Issues
Follow best practices when investigating issues with drives and media.
- Tape alert detail
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Tape alert counts for the last exchange are available on the Drive, Media, and Exchange Overview screens. To determine the nature of a tape alert, go to the Exchanges Overview Detail View and review the following sections:
- Exchange Alerts – Severe
- Exchange Alerts – Warning
- Exchange Alerts – Informational
- Transient media
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Media must be in a library storage cell or a drive at the time of a data collection for it to be detected. Media in a transient location is not detected by a data collection and therefore may not appear on the STA screens.
If media is unexpectedly missing, see How STA Handles "Missing" Media for some troubleshooting steps.
- Collect drive details
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If you suspect a problem with a drive, save details of its recent activity to a PDF file. You can include this file in any inquiries to Oracle Service.
- On the Drives Overview screen, select the Drive Serial Number active link to display the Detail View.
- Save the resulting display as a PDF file.
- Export and review recent exchanges for a drive
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Exchange detail may provide valuable information about a drive issue.
- On the Drives Overview screen, select View, then Columns. then Show More Columns.
- Move Drive Dismounts (30 days) into the Visible Columns column, then click OK.
- Select the Drive Dismounts (30 days) aggregate count link for the drive. You are taken to the Exchanges Overview screen, filtered to show all the exchanges included in the count.
- On the Exchanges Overview List View, select Columns, then Show All.
- Select Export, then Exchange.xls to export the data to Excel format.
- A fixable condition may stand out to you as you scroll through the worksheet columns. For example, you may notice that the "Media Directory Invalid" error appears on multiple media.
- Create a site-specific STA task cheat sheet
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For each area of concern or activity you have accomplished in STA, document the quick steps to do it. For example:
- Determining which drives have been cleaned over the last month
- Determining which drives have been idle more than a week
- Determining if some media need to be retired
- How to do year-end planning and new media purchase estimates
Use the procedures in the preceding sections as starting points.