topic Re: HVD controller for rx8620 in Integrity Servers

HVD controller for rx8620

Ray Allen_1 — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:43:21 GMT

Hi,

Does anyone know if HP carries a HVD controller card or HVD-LVD controller for an rx8620? If not, would the paralan mh16/mh17 HVD-LVD converter work on this system. Trying to attach an HVD tape library to the server.

Thanks,

Ray

Re: HVD controller for rx8620

timmy b. — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:04:26 GMT

Ray,
The only SCSI cards listed for the rx8620 are Ultra160 or Ultra320. Nothing in there about a High Voltage Differential card. Thus they aren't supported.

As for the paralan, you'd have to ask THEM if they think it'll work in an Itanium box.

Re: HVD controller for rx8620

rick jones — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 13:22:22 GMT

There used to be the A5159A which was a dual-port VHD HVD SCSI card. It was supported on the rx2600 under HP-UX at least.

As such, it might "work" in an rx8620 if the driver is still in 11.23 if you are running HP-UX. I suspect there would be a driver that would claim it if you were running Linux.

Of course this then takes us to the difference in HPSpeak between "works" and "supported"

Supported, known to work -> warm fuzzies all around
Supported, not known to not work -> an HPite may be in trouble
Supported, known to not work -> an HPite is in trouble
Unsupported, known to work -> lucky today, unlucky tomorrow?
Unsupported, not known to not work -> there but for the grace of Turing
Unsupported, known to not work -> no, it was not deliberate ;-)

The paralan converter would be another item in the "might work" but "not supported" arena.

As time passes, being able to connect an HVD device to anything is likely to become more and more troublesome. You might want to start migrating to tape library with a newer flavor of controller if possible.

Re: HVD controller for rx8620

Joshua Scott — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 12:39:15 GMT

Rick,

I had a customer who was using the rx2600, and the A5159A card was supported up through 11iv1.6
When he moved to 2.0, the card no longer worked, and he had to get an A6828A Ultra160 SCSI card, and the paralan mh17 or something like that.

Ray,
I have seen the paralan products work just fine under HP-UX 11iv2, so you should be good to go with it.

Not sure what tape library you have, but a lot of them have a fibre-HVD interface you can buy, which may be more economical than getting the SCSI converter.

Josh