How-to Write 3PAR Data to External Hard Drive

[jakolodziej]

3PAR Experts:

The company owns a 3PAR StoreServ 7200 Storage Array and a physical Service Processor. The 3PAR serves as a RAID array connected to two rx2800 Integrity Servers running HP-UX11i v3. These devices are on a dedicated LAN with no external connections (due to the sensitive nature of our data). I have been asked to provide some files from our system to a colleague in Linux (or Windows) format. The files I need to provide are under my home directory, and our home directories are NFS-mounted in a Veritas (vxfs) format. I have a USB external hard drive that I can format any way needed (ext3, ext4, xfs, etc). I can, of course, plug the external drive into the Integrity Server, or the SP.

It seems this should be trivial to do, but I cannot figure out how I can transfer a file from my home directory on the 3PAR (on a vxfs filesystem) to the external hard drive (in a ext3, ext4, or xfs filesystem). Any help would be appreciated.

Jeff

[Sheldon Smith]

Hi Jeff,

The 3PAR StoreServ Storage Array provides block storage to your HP-UX Integrity Servers. It is not a file server. It does not have visibility into any exported virtual volume. The Service Processor is not a file server. It also does not have visibility into any exported virtual volume.

If there are files on the storage used by the HP-UX Integrity Servers, then you will need to access the files by way of the HP-UX servers. Or some other server that "speaks" NFS to access your home directory. But for now you are looking in the wrong place. Extracting files from virtual volume is not something the StoreServ was designed to do.

(There are options to allow certain StoreServ arrays to function as File Servers as well as Block Servers. However, the File Server functionality uses its own virtual volume(s), and still would not have visibility inside the HP-UX volumes.)

[Torsten.]

>> It seems this should be trivial to do

No, it isn't.

You cannot get the data from the SP (see post above) and you cannot connect an USB disk to the Integrity server.

Consider to connect your PC to the HP-UX server and get the files transfered, e.g. scp, sftp, ...

[jakolodziej]

Hi Sheldon,

Hi Torsten:

Thanks for the quick reply to my question and the advice. OK, looks like I'll need to consdier other options of getting the data in the form I need it.

I assigned kudos - thanks again for the help.

Jeff