Attaching an external LTO drive to a DL380 G4

[Peter Fell]

Hi,

Can anyone confirm that by default the DL380 G4's are shipped with the 6i controller in Embedded Simplex CSI cabling configuration, i.e. allowing an external LTO drive to be hung off the external VHDCI port as well as having six internal disks. We've done this on my recommendation and the backups are ridiculously slow.

[Steven Clementi]

Peter:

By default, the DL380G4 ships in "simplex" mode (or at least the ones that I have been getting are in simplex), which is ironic because I ordered 2 G4/MSA500G2 Cluster-in-a-box and they came from the factory in "duplex" mode effectively disabling the external connection (which is the first Array Connection used by the 2 nodes.)

If your server is in Duplex mode, you would not even be able to see the LTO drive.

In simplex mode, you should be able to run 6 internal disks and the LTO, but is probably not the best solution. A dedicated SCSI adaptor would be the best choice, but not necessary.


Steven

[Mahesh Kumar Malik]

Hi Peter

It is not recommended to put hard disks and tape drive/library on same SCSI channel becuase IO bandwiths for HDDs and tape drives are quite different. Suggest a dedicated SCSI card for Tape Drive

Regards
Mahesh

[Peter Fell]

Cheers for your replies. A colleague installed a Ultra 160 SCSI card in the server (should really be a Ultra 320 but that was the only card that was lying around at the time) and it cut the backups from 10 hours 50 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. We'll get a U320 card ordered ASAP. This sort of thing is real annoying/confusing as I definitely checked out the HP bumpf before hand and it stated that the external port could be used for tape devices, was dual channel etc but I guess in future I'll always spec a seperate SCSI card.

[stefano colombo_1]

Hi all ,
I've made the same consideration regarding the possibility of connecting the tape drive to the external port
What I was thinking is that given a simplex configuration the external port would have used th second "available" channel. Instead I see the LTO drive conencted in the same bus as the disk drives .

There isn't a way to use the second channel to attach the external LTO ?
thanks

[Steven Clementi]

Stefano:

It would probably be best to start a new post since your issue is a bit different from Peter's. It will also allow you to close out the thread when you have fixed the issue, assign points to replies and give others with the same problem a more consice path to follow while they search for their answers/help.

I would definitely include a screenshot of "where" you're seeing that both the hard drives and the tape drive seem to be on the same bus. Also, check your actual device properties. target:bus:lun (or is it bus:target:lun?) values.... and post them.


Steven

[Peter Fell]

Hi,

As mentioned my backups have now been sorted with a dedicated SCSI card in the server but I did experience something similar to Stefano's problem. Prior to installing the SCSI card I needed to use the Array configuration manager for an un-related problem and afterwards the LTO drive was showing as being Offline. This made me think that the LTO drive was on the same bus as the disks.

Peter

[stefano colombo_1]

Hi ,
started a new thread as suggested.
By the way :
- I see the tape is on the same channel as the disks when the server boots and the SA6i display its configuration. At that moment I cannot get a screenshot