Surestore E 2/20 robot excessive exercising

[Chris Driver]

We have a Surestore E 2/20 tape library.
The robot is going through an exercising phase several times a day and sometimes this can last for 15 minutes or so. We have the latest version of the firmware for the controller.
Is this excessive and if so is there any way of configuring it in any way, i.e. hardware calls etc?

[Curtis Ballard · Accepted solution]

I know it looks excessive but extensive testing showed that the picker life was actually greater when it was run over the entire range of motion several times per day and several times in a row at least once per day. We ran for hundreds of thousands of sweeps in every imaginable environmental condition and finally settled on the algortihm that is in the 1.60.0 firmware as the one that would provide the best picker life.

The maintenance or exercise routine is to sweep one full sweep every hour with 25 full sweeps once per day. When the 25 sweeps runs is configurable in the library configurations menu and is called the "Sweep Hour". The number of sweeps is not configurable.

My library sits right by my desk so I have it run the 25 sweeps in the middle of the night. The default is to run at noon when studies have shown that tape libraries are least likely to be active.

You can set the sweep hour to anything you want. It doesn't matter if it falls in the middle of a backup as there is no change in how it responds to a backup application. The library will suspend the exercise and perform any move requests so there is no impact to a backup.

One question I get frequently is "Why does my library need to exercise when it performs several moves every day in normal operation?" The answer to that is that often moves in normal operation are only moving over a small range of motion and the exercise routine moves over more of the range of motion than any normal move can because it is able to move past the end slot locations.

With the exercise algorithm in 1.60.0 firmware your picker should outlive your drives by several years.