Life span of the LTO Cleaning Tape

Many IT personnel/specialist didn't really know when to use the Tape Backup Unit (TBU) cleaning tape. If you google about this topic, I'm pretty sure you can't find any exact instruction about this but only some suggestion from many experienced IT specialist.

For me, I will suggest you to clean the TBU at least once in a fortnight. If you are a heavy user, and every day you need to backup at last 400GB of data, then you might need to consider clean it at least once in a week.

Few weeks ago, I noticed even some of the IT personnel did schedule the drive cleaning, but they didn't know how many times that a cleaning tape can be used, and they just keep cleaning the drive with a cleaning media which already exceed its life span.

Please take a look from the below description:

An LTO cleaning cartridge can be used approximately 50 times, and the inventory count shows 50 cleans remaining until you load the tape into a drive for the first time. An SDLT-320 cleaning cartridge can be used approximately 20 times

For more information, you may refers to below URL:

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/stor-sys/132TLTO2/en/ug_tl/faq.htm

Dell PowerVault: Initial Log-in Name & Password for Dell NX3000

I notice that many customer didn't know about Initial log-in name & password for Power Vault NX3000. Actually it is included in the Manual, but not much people will actually go through once before they start to configure.

The funniest thing is what customer will do is call in and blame Dell that didn't inform customer about this info. Usually I will share them the Online documentation about NX3000 as below:

Username: administrator

Password: Stor@ge!

You may refers to Dell Online Documentation which available 24/7:

http://support.ap.dell.com/support/edocs/stor-sys/NX3000/en/ag/html/initial_.htm#wp1193528