A specially labeled IBM LTO Universal Ultrium Cleaning Cartridge is designed to clean the drive in your library. The drive determines when it needs to be cleaned and notifies the library. When notified, the library indicates that the drive needs cleaning by turning on the "Clean Drive" LED on the front panel of the library and posting a message on the library display.
In the past, to support client and application requirements and expectations for cleaning, each LTO drive vendor provided its own cleaning cartridge specifically for Ultrium drives. To avoid potential interoperability problems, the LTO consortium decided to introduce a universal cleaning cartridge. IBM offers only the universal cleaning cartridge type that can be used in any LTO drive type.
IBM Ultrium LTO tape drives are self-monitoring and self-cleaning, and uses the automatic cleaning function that is provided with the library or by the application as recommended by IBM. Each drive determines when it must be cleaned and alerts the library or the application to initiate a cleaning cycle.
To prevent recontamination of drive surfaces, each specific cleaner cartridge is limited up to 50 cleaning cycles. Cleaner tape use is determined by the length of the tape that is already used, therefore the average number of cleaning cycles for a cleaning cartridge is 50, but it can be marked used before or after 50 mounts.
