Tape remains in downtime. During a brief discussion with the DDM team at S&C Week, we confirmed that the extended downtime required to implement the new internal dCache tape workflow can be scheduled at any time, since secondary copies of the data are available elsewhere. The hardware issue that triggered the current downtime has allowed us to begin part of this work while giving IBM sufficient time to investigate the performance problem thoroughly. The current plan is to restore tape services on Friday.

Efficiency has been intermittently low, occasionally very low, owing to persistent backoff errors in the dense servers.  We are in touch with Dell to try to figure out what is going on.  While this goes on, we will remove the dense servers from the cluster, as soon as we can arrange for alternative storage for the various necessary services running on them.