Tape Library Software with SAN Awareness

[Clark Powell]

We have a Fibre Channel, HP MSL 6060A tape library and 5 OpenVMS nodes that use it but which are not clustered. With this hardware we are using MTI Tapecontrol to control our finished tapes and MTI Oasis and/or HTRM to control the library itself. TapeControl is completely adequate for our purposes and so is HTRM and Oasis except for one critical problem. None of these products are SAN aware. That is, the sofware doesn't know when a drive is being used by another node on the SAN. It will blindly try to mount a tape on a drive that is being used by another OpenVMS system.
We have been told that there is an HP product (possibly freeware) that will, when a tape drive is in use, allocate the drive on all the other nodes. This would solve our problem. But, we don't know what this software is called or even if it really exists. Is anybody aware of this software?

[Phillip Thayer]

You might be talking about HP Archive Backup System (ABS) http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/storage/abspage.html or HP Storage Library System (SLS) http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/storage/slspage.html

Look at those and see if they fit your need.

Phil

[Robert Atkinson]

If this is your only problem, why not just create a lock database.

Choose a node to create a file on, and then write the nodename into the file of any node that currently owns the drive, remembering to check the file first of course.

Once the backups are complete, simply empty the file.

Rob.

[Clark Powell]

Our constraints here are 1.) we want to augment our existing library and robot software and 2.) we would prefer not to get involved in a software developement program. If someone has created a freeware program for coordinating SAN served tape drives or if some vendor has a module for sale that will do the trick, that's what we're looking for.

[Volker Halle]

A similar question has been asked recently:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1000100

Writing something like this would not be a major 'software development'. A couple of lines of DCL code should be sufficient. If your nodes are running DECnet and one has a default DECnet account:

To 'reserve' a tape:

$ OPEN/WRITE x node::TAPE.DAT;1

If it succeeds, you own the tape. When you're done, close and delete the file. If it fails (file already exists), enter a retry loop, until you could create the file.

Volker.