Tape Drive Error Handling policy

Purpose

Even if hardware used at various HEP sites varies, all tape drives generate set of indicators reflecting the status of the undergoing operation.

This text tries to suggest how such errors should be handled by the tape operations team. For example, after how many soft errors an action should be taken to migrate the data before a permanent error occurs.

Proposal

The proposal should define common error detection levels. At the moment tape drives register soft and hard errors in nvram. The action taken after a soft or hard error is detected must be defined. A starting point could be the interpretation used by the StorSentry software. (Currently the StorSentry error detection levels are not known and should be asked for by HiStore)

-- VladimirBahyl - 05-Jul-2010