LTO9 Optimizer

This is a simple bash script to initialize/optimize LTO9 physical tapes.

The problem

Enterprise LTO9 tapes are cool, but if you buy them in stocks of 1,000, or even 2,000, you potentially need weeks before using them. A single tape is held from 20 minutes up to 2 hours in the drive, and you cannot do anything but wait. This is the standard behavior from this LTO generation.

I find unnerving that enterprise tape libraries are sold without a feature to do this automatically, so I wrote this simple bash script.

The solution

Connect the Tape Library to a Linux server using SAS or FiberChannel (I only have tested FC), then run lsscsi -g | grep medium to get the special device of the changer, which will be something like /dev/sgX.

Then you can run the command:

optimizer.sh </dev/sgX> <parallelism>

Where 'parallelism' is a number, which can be equal to the number of the drives of the library/partition.

The script takes long pauses to avoid too many load/unload commands, so... be patient.

It has been tested with both:

• IBM TS4500 Tape Library
• Quantum i6000 Tape Library

Dependencies

The only package required is mtx.

Fun facts

As far as I know, up to today, 4th of July, 2023, none of the major brands of Tape Libraries can provide a tool capable of this. I wrote the script in a day, then tested and fixed it.

Total time spent: 3 days.

Total money earned: none, so I'll just put it here.

Please note that this script does not mean to replace any of the eventual official tools that may exist – but sadly I wasn't aware of.

P.S. I am aware the script is poorly written, but I don't have a test environment anymore to test it properly. I'll do it in my spare time.