I have Simpana 9.0SP6a that was configured by someone (CommVault Pro Services I think) years ago. Cleaning was configured in Simpana. At the beginning of this year I had many problems with the backups and tape unit (Dell PowerVault TL4000) which were resolved initially by CommVault Pro Services and the hardware issues were dealt with later by Dell.
One issue was that cleaning appeared to be being done more than it should which could cause problems with the drives. When Dell got involved part of the process was making the tape library do the cleaning and take it away from Simpana.
It seems that if you ask software people (CommVault) they swear that cleaning should be done in software but if you ask hardware people (Dell) they swear that it should be done in hardware. As Simpana doesn't talk to PowerVault it has to be one or the other.
What is best? I realise I'm asking this in a software forum so if the answer is "of course it should be done in software" I'd like good reasons why it should not be done in hardware.
Dell say that it is the hardware that is doing all the work and it should know when it needs a clean. CommVault says it keeps track of it and does it based on counters. The good thing about Simpana is that you can easily see how much cleaning it's done, when, and how many errors it's encountered since a clean which hardware does not and it's not the easiest of interfaces even to find out how many times the cleaning tape has been mounted. I look at Simpana every day, usually multiple times, so seeing this information is great but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is best for keeping the drive in check and performance optimal.
What are people's experiences and thoughts on this?
