HP StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 Drivers?

[Andreas Leibetseder_1]

Hello!

Friday i finally got four of these amazing drives in exchange for some other manufacturer's LTO-4 drives, who have a massive performance problem due to a ridiculous U160 interface and were therefore returned...

However, i am missing the native drivers for Windows Server 2003 (both 32- and 64-bit), as i don't want to use generic drivers.

The somehow fixed 64 kB blocksize of BackupExec's generic halfinch-driver does not allow for speeds of more than 132 MB/s, although the storagesystems and servers can deliver continuously at least some 380 MB/s and the average compression factor is 1:1.56. This should give some expected performance between 180 and 200 MB/s for the U320-attached 1840.

So i'd like to set the blocksize to 512 kB in the HP-supplied driver, as this different setting was also a huge leap with xxx's drive. This showed 114 MB/s with 64 kB blocksize and U160-limited 144 MB/s with 512 kB.

However, all i can find in the download section is the current HP L&TT but no driver...

Can please someone provide a link for the Windows LTO-4 drivers (production releases please)?

Thank you very much in advance!

Best regards, Andreas

[Trevor Roddam]

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?prodNameId=3454488〈=en&cc=us&taskId=135&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3454484

This is the link to the HP Web Site for the 1840. Though you have probably been there already.

The best thing is to download the latest drivers from you backup vendor. HP Data Protector (DP) will be able to do the job and the block size is adjusted within DP. It is not normally advised to do this as it will limit the recovery drives and SW able to be used.

It would seem you're limited by the Backup SW, not the tape driver....
HP DP can be trialled for 60 days without a license. Be careful loading DP and Veritas on the same server though... And make sure your DNS has A and PTR working first.

Hope this helps.
Trevor.

[Andreas Leibetseder_1]

Hello Trevor,

Thank you for your answer and advice. Yes, i've been at this link before and got the new L&TT and found nothing else.

Fortunately, i the last box of the four drives i found a CD with the drivers (1.0.5.1). This CD was missing in the supplied materials of the drives i opened before.

Changing to HP Data Protector would not be an easy task, as we have 35 servers in four datacenters spread across Austria and storagesystems, wan-replication, backup-to-disk and duplicate to tapes has taken a long time to prove the ability of loosing three of the four datacenters without business impact or desaster...

So, everything is fine now regarding the drivers for the 1840 drives. However, another thing is puzzeling me currently much more than performance gain due to large blocksizes:

The drives are attached as single units mounted in HPs 3U 19"-Chassis to U320 controllers like LSI 53C1030 onboard an Intel SE7520JR2 (Firmware 5.10.06) or Adaptec 29320LPE (Firmware 4.31.2) with U320 cables, active terminators and termination power enabled on the drive.

The infamous removable storage service is disabled in Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 Enterprise.

When booting the servers, initial negotiation of the controllers with the drives is fine with 320 MB/s as shown in the attached screenshot.

However, during or after booting the OS, somewhere happens a reinitialisation of the SCSI bus with the tape drive, because L&TT suddenly shows only a U160 connection between the SCSI controllers and the drive and gives a warning about the degraded Ultrium-4 drive. This is not only a cosmetic glitch in the report, but the transfer rate maxes out at 136 MB/s with the LSI controllers and 138 MB/s with the Adaptecs.

When connecting U320 disk-drives to the very same controllers with the very same cables, terminators and enclosure, the drives remain at U320. Of course i tried other cables, terminators and toggeles the termination power jumper and even did a experimental setup with connecting the drives on the second internal port of the LSI controller, but it's always the same: negotiation is correct with 320 MB/s during booting and falls back to U160 during starting of the OS.

I tried this on four servers (2 Intel SR-1450 with LSI, 1 Supermicro SYS-6025B and 1 Supermicro SYS-6015B each with Adaptec).

No warnings or errors are recorded in the eventlog. The monitoring tools of LSI and Adaptec show U320 on the controllers and U320 for disk-drives and U160 for the LTO-drive after booting. Of course, disk-drives and LTO are not connected at the same time.

I also tried Microsoft Hotfix KB932755 with lots of Storport corrections and used the WHQL drivers from LSI (1.10.02) and Adaptec (7.0.0.6) and the latetest non-WHQL LSI 1.20.18, but this did not help either.

The fallback of the drives from U320 to U160 during OS boot seems to be inevitable...

Our drives have Firmware B22D and the serial numbers HU17280535, HU1728052V, HU1728053B and HU1728052H.

I hope you have a suggestion what to try next.

Now, after the return of your competitors LTO-4 drives which were limited to U160 by interface design, i now have LTO-4 drives that prove to be U320-capable during startup, but after booting i'm again at U160 and equally fast as with the other drives.

At least the the 1840 drives are still a little faster in U160 than our current 460s...

But then, four of the 1840s and 100 LTO-4 media are far to expensive to justify the difference!

Please find the mentioned screenshot and a PDF with the L&TT report in the attachment to this post.

Best regards, Andreas

[Andreas Leibetseder_1]

...and here is the second attachment...

[CLin_1]

how many devices are you connecting per HBA?

i don't see the HBA controller in support ticket that has the tape drive attached.

Regards,

Chun

[Andreas Leibetseder_1]

Hello Chris,

The Ultrium is the only device connected to this HBA.

In the L&TT report, the two LSI HBAs are the devices with the name ' ' at addresses 3/0.7.0 for the LTO (3/0.2.0) and 2/0.7.0 for RAID 1 (2/0.0.0), which are somehow interpreted as Disk_NA in L&TT.

The iSCSI initiator is a Disk_NA too (4/0.1.0) and memory is not correct, because there are 4096 MB in this server.

I attached an extract of the device manager sorted by connection to this post.

Kind regards, Andreas