Mounting dat24 tape drive on multiple servers

[SolutionWorks]

I would like to allow a dat24 tape drive to be shared by multiple servers. Is this possible by remote mounting it? If so, how would I do this?

P.S. This thread has been moved from Disk to HP-UX > ignite. -HP Forum Moderator

[RBaker]

Possible using SAN based solution with Arcserve, BE, .. etc. What I think you want is some more tape drives though, or a nominated backup server with agents.

Remote mounting will not work as there is no software to manage the drive contention issues, much like disk drives and the use of clustering.

[Dave Wherry]

What utility are you going to use to access this tape drive?

If you are using fbackup/frecover you can access the drive across the network.

If you are using a more robust backup package (Data Protector, Netbackup....) you can load an agent on each server and again use the drive across the network.

I can't remember the details right now but, tar and cpio can redirect to a drive on another system. It's just been a long time since I did it.

Direct/Shared attach can be done using fibre channel (FC). You need a FC HBA on each server. These can be connected to a FC/SCSI bridge which then allows the servers to each access the tape drive. Your limits are 2 FC (host) connections on the bridge and 4 SCSI (device) ports so this would mean 2 servers could access 4 tape drives.
If you needed more connections to servers you could use a FC hub in front of the bridge and the hubs could be cascaded to allow more connections.

Having said that, by the time you go through the expense and complexity of setting this up, you might as well just buy more tape drives. You're only talking about a DAT24.
A DAT40 has a list price of $899
You could rack a 5300 Tape Array which will hold up to 4 removable media devices that can be attached to different servers. The list on that is:
5300 Tape Array $1,045
DAT40 module $1049

That is just to show the high end. You could find used DAT24 drives a lot cheaper.

[SolutionWorks]

Thanks for the replies. After thinking about this more, we are going to set up one server as an Ignite server and the others as clients. Currently installing Ignite...

[SolutionWorks]

Ok, having problems on install... of course...

When running HP's supplied command:

swinstall -s /myfolder/Ignite-UX-11-11_B.5.4.61_HP-UX_B.11.11_32+64.depot \*

I get this error:
You do not have the required permissions to perform this operation. Check permissions using the "swacl" command or see your system administrator for assistance. Or, to manage applications designed and packaged for nonprivileged mode, see the "run_as_superuser" option in the "sd" man page.
* Source connection failed for
"stpux233:/home/mcabibbo/Ignite-UX-11-11_B.5.4.61_HP-UX_B.11.11_32+64.depot".

I am root user. Any ideas?