Optional Fibre Channel Card for MSL family

[Adam White_4]

Hi all

We are looking at getting rid of our NSR and I checked the product page for the MSL5000 series to see it can be upgraded to support direct Fibre Channel connectivity.

I was suprised to see that the optional Fibre Channel card for the library does not replace the SCSI connectors, but is patched into them using a 0.5m cable.

It seems to me that this card is some kind of "mini NSR" and may have many of the same administrative overheads of using a rack-mounted NSR. Is this correct?

Does the MSL6000 series use the same approach, ie onboard FC card that connects to onboard SCSI connectors via cables, or is it a "straight through" FC system similar to a HP SAN?

Thanks

Adam

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

As far as I'm aware the MSL6000 series uses the same approach as the 5000 series. The NSR (e1200-160 or e1200-320) is a card which slots in the back of the library to connect FC to SCSI.

If you need native FC connectivity you need to be looking at something like the MSL8096.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[Steven Clementi]

Unfortunately, it is the same.

What kind of overhead do you have? Usually, you just set one mapping as the default and then all the hosts you zone with the nsr should automatically see the library/drives.

There is not much you can do with only 2 drives. At most, you can have 3 different configurations.


Steven

[Adam White_4]

Thanks guys.

Yes Steven that is basically what I do at the moment with the NSR. I was expecting/hoping that moving the FC would alleviate the need to configure it at all and just allow me to set everything up with the switch fabric zones.

But obviously that is not the case.