TMSCLEAN is taking much longer to run. Is there a way to improve this process?

Products

• CA 1 Tape Management

Issue/Introduction

Our TMSCLEAN job is taking longer to run now.  On a day-to-day basis (excluding weekends) it scratches around 45,000 tapes.  Before, it used to run under 3 hours with the scratching of about 270+ tapes per minute, but now it takes more than 7 hours and is scratching 100 tapes per minute.  Are there any parameters, techniques or changes that would improve the performance of TMSCLEAN?

Environment

Release : 14.0

Component : CA 1 Tape Management

Cause

The TS7700 microcode was recently upgraded from 8.50.2.6 to 8.51.1.26.

Resolution

The TS7700 microcode upgrade is causing the TMSCLEAN performance degradation.  IBM indicates that this is a known issue with CMVC 92147 and will be fixed in 8.51PGA2.