I have been working with Tivoli Storage Manager running on Win2K for almost 2 years now. 1 year ago, we migrated from a IBM Magstar 3570 tape library (which is really a dinosaur!) to the IBM 3584 Ultrium LTO library. Backups really fly now!

And yes, there are Ultrium LTO cleaning tapes.

I load the cleaning tape in manually (using the library controls, not TSM) every 6 months, just to be safe. I have never looked up what the recommended tape cleaning frequency on these drives is, but so far so good. The only problem I have ever had was when 1 of my tapes was eaten by the drive. I had to call IBM out to disassemble the drive to remove the tape. The drive was fine after that!

So, try getting a cleaning tape for the Ultrium and load it, see if it holds.

Also, does your Ultrium tape drive have the red LED display? If so, what number does it have on it? 0 or something else? The numbers codes do mean different things. I know you can look them up at the IBM Redbook site located here.

But yes, you will probably need an IBM engineer. Good luck!