Issues with Ultrium-3 Tape drive

[Joshua Small_2]

I have tested and can confirm the issue is not related to the driver.
I had swapped the tape drive and SCSI card and still found the issue persisted.
However after swapping a riser board, the issue appears resolved.

I am satisfied the riser board is the cause of the issue, of course the difficulty now is getting HP to accept that.

[Andrew Mackay(CA)]

I have just found this post.

I am having the exactly the same issue but with a couple of differences.

1. I have HP DL380 G5's
2. Windows 2003 R2 32bit edition
3. HP LSI Ultra 320 2000 Series PCI-E SCSI card
4. HP Ultrium 960 direct attached drive.
5. L&TT reports I am having a SCSI cabling issue
6. HP Data Protector reports an issue writing data to media.[90:51] Cannot write to device because of an I/O error.

Since we purchased this server we haven't had a good backup.

I noticed that the PSP(Latest) I installed does not even install the latest PCI controllers etc for the mainboard.

So my question is there a problem with this new 'storport' scsi card driver?

[Joshua Small_2]

Hi Andrew,

I don't believe it's a storport issue at all.

I should have followed this up more, but I got distracted.
The issue resurfaced and eventually HP loaned us a completely different tape drive (SDLT) and the issue went away.

So in summary either we've had three different bad LTO drives (possible but unlikely) or there is simply something wrong with the LTO drives or the LATEST driver shipping with them.

Perhaps it wasn't ported to a 64 bit OS correctly, or perhaps it just is too generic and hasn't been customised for this drive.

We've been waiting several months for a further result but so far HP still tell us they are working on putting together a test lab so they can replicate it.

[Andrew Mackay(CA)]

I working on this issue at the moment as we are at a critical stage due to this being a production server in a remote office which is making it very hard.

Currently results
- I having the problem in a 32bit environment
- I can't backup anything over 30GB
- If I run smaller backups under 30GB they are successful.
- I was going to start changing the block size on the tape as a test.


Thanks for you quick reply Joshua
I will keep you posted, I have just logged my call with HP

[Joshua Small_2]

Well it's interesting to see it's not a 64 bit OS issue.

We too have a production server in a remote office.. it's a nightmare to work through this.

Do you have a copy of the HPSReport tool from HP? It's their tool that collects server information for their diagnostics. If you want to call them, I would strongly suggest you run it first. Then with them on the phone, get the email address and send it to them, even if they say they don't want it. Don't let them off the phone until they acknowledge they have it.

Then spam it to them every couple of days just to make sure they got it.

It seems to be the only way to stop them wasting your time by repeatedly asking for it.

[Soren Nicolaisen]

Hi,

We now have 2 cases with DL380G5's. One is at a remote office and the other is luckily at our main location.
Our remote site is using a MSL2024 library and the main facility uses a MSL6060.
Both DL380G5's uses the SC11Xe HP SCSI card and the 1.24.4 storeport drivers from the psp 7.90. Two of those cards are used in the backup server in our main facility. One of those cards run the one drive and robot and the other runs the second drive. Terminators all have green lights and cables work well with the old server.
OS is Windows 2003 R2 SP2 32bit installed on the P400 smart array controller
The Tape drives and Robot runs the latest firmwares supplied with the latest release of the HP tape tools.
Our corporate backup tool is EMC Networker 7.3 SP3 and when setting up the Jukebox we receive the following error running the jbconfig jukebox configuration tool that add's the robot to Networker.

Scanning SCSI buses; this may take a while ...
In update_scsi_bus_map: open_bus invalid on nadapters = 5
jbconfig: Jukebox error: scsi command MODE_SENSE failed

HP Tape tools states an error on the juke box, but not the drives.
If we revert to our old backup server that runs Windows 2003 SP1, the robot, HP Tape tools and tape drives + networker function perfectly.
We tried changing the riser card with one that supports PCI-X on the G5 and the old SCSI card from the old backup server that we know works, and the results was the same.

We are starting to run out of good ideas of what is causing our problems.

Thanks
Soren

[Joshua Small_2]

I've still gotten nowhere with this.
The tape drive works fine on other servers.
Different drives of the same type do not work on our server.
Different drives of different type do. The drive is supposed to be HP supported, so far we're waiting on a November 7th date for someone to start looking at it.

[HKoenig]

Hallo Joshua,

had anybody checked the cabling, regarding the differences for the LTO3 Tape drives in the MSL. Youre termination should be on the drives,
not as in the past on the Robotic Controller. You got problems with the old termination, depending on speeed and amount of data.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00873645/c00873645.pdf

[Joshua Small_2]

We've had HP technicians onsite observing the cabling (which had already been changed) and there was no issue anyone could locate.

[Andrew Mackay(CA)]

Just an update on my issue?

I still have not got anywhere with this, HP don't have a clue whatâ s going.

The diagnostics they want me to perform are so unrealistic and the HP technician I have assigned refuses to believe this thread is related to my problem.

This is an evil problem that has me stumped