MIR Performance Analysis

We provide analysis of Oracle StorageTek T10000 Generation B (T10KB) Media Information Record (MIR) Performance Data gathered over the course of a year from our production High Performance Storage System (HPSS). The analysis shows information in the MIR may be used to improve tape subsystem operations. Most notably, we found the MIR information to be helpful in determining whether the drive or tape was most suspect given a read or write error, and for helping identify which tapes should not be reused given their history of read or write errors. We also explored using the MIR Assisted Search to order file retrieval requests. We found that MIR Assisted Search may be used to reduce the time needed to retrieve collections of files from a tape volume.