Patent ID: 8849784

Claim:
A data storage system for monitoring a tape infrastructure including a tape library comprising a plurality of tape drives and a plurality of tape media for use in the tape drives, the data storage system comprising: a server communicatively linked to the tape library; on the server, a storage tape analytics application extracting and processing data sets from the tape library corresponding to operations of the tape library including use of the tape drives and the tape media during data storage in the tape library; and a user interface module providing a user interface for viewing the extracted and processed data, wherein the user interface is operable to receive user input to initiate media validation of a set of the tape media, wherein the media validation comprises reading data from each of the tape media in the set using one or more of the tape drives in the tape library, and wherein the media validation comprises determining a read quality index (RQI) based on the reading data and comparing the determined RQI with a minimum RQI.