LTO Ultrium 2 – free management software

backupltotape

i'm making backup using ntbackup to write on LTO Ultrium 2 cartridges ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open ).

All worked fine till last week when suddenly all cartridges are rejected (for backup) by the tape.
(Just a bit of information i tried the tape with a NEW cartridge and all going fine).

My question is: is there a free/opensource software to check the health of my LTO Ultrium cartridges?

In another place where i worked we have to revalidate cartridges (LTO Ultirum 1) and retension them every year (using CA Brightstor).

Thank you in advance!

Best Answer

You're using LTO (the technology name) and Ultrium (a specific product name) interchangeably, which leads me to believe you're using an HP tape drive.

If using HP gear, you can try the free HP Library and Tape Tools (HP L&TT) software to run diagnostics and media operations on your drive. It's available for Windows, as well as other operating systems.

There are other management tools available for Quantum and IBM drives, but try the HP software first, since the mechanics of other drives may be the similar.

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If LTO-3 full backup takes more than one tape. What is the next step hardware wise

As an asdide, note that 100MB/min is far below the minimum speed for tape streaming with LTO 3, so you're probably losing a fair amount of capacity with the tape stopping and starting (ie you're probably getting better than 1.5:1 compression, but this is lost in gaps in the data on the tape). This will probably be rather worse with LTO 4, as I think the minimum speed has gone up.

Disk - Disk - Tape will help with the minimum speed problem, and will give you some capacity for free.

If you're not doing it, strongly consider some kind of scheduled defrag of the disks on the servers you're backing up. 1000 MB/min is not a great level of throughput for gig ethernet on reasonably modern hardware. I'd expect that on even 2 year old machines you should be able to get 1800MB/min (that's only reading from the server disk at 30MB/sec), so there's scope for improvement.

Edit: For LTO 3, you really want a 256KB block size for best performance.

WRT shoe shining, There's no time for the tape to rewind if the buffer runs empty briefly, so it'll leave a gap on the tape.

Determining LTO Cleaning Tape Expiration

Very simple with an IBM LTO cleaning cartridge and a Tivoli Server. (which means it may be slightly different for whatever hardware combination you're using) but the command I use is simply:

query libvolume f=d

Or when "automatic cleaning" is enabled, the usage is accessed via:

 Main Menu > Usage Statistics > Cleaning Cartridge Usage

Good luck and enjoy.

Oh and shelf life/uses is determined by manufacture, I don't ever go beyond 50. I get nervous at around 40 uses.

Edit/Update: Confirmed the label of a Quantum Cleaning Tape says maximum uses is 50. Tandberg and Fujifilm LTOs do not have their cleaning tapes marked accordingly with any recommendations on usage.

Best Answer

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If LTO-3 full backup takes more than one tape. What is the next step hardware wise

Determining LTO Cleaning Tape Expiration

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