ESL712e Library driver failed

[daosheng]

Customer has ESL712e library, had 8 ultr460 SCSI drivers and 16 ultr960 FC drivers in different partitions.
Recently there're 3 ultr960 drivers failed. But after reboot the library or reset the driver, the status of the drivers return ok.
And after fews times of backup test, the drivers failed again.
After that, we replaced all the unnormal drivers. But now the same problem still exists.
By the way, all the FW are the latest.

[Curtis Ballard]

You don't state what errors are received but from the details you provide it sounds like they were likely communication errors.

Communication errors are almost never due to drive problems and replacing drives only causes extra problems. Check all of the system carefully for new servers added to the SAN, changes to SAN zoning, any cabling changes, are all the drives on the same interface controller, do the communication errors occur from the same host.

A large number of communication problems to drives are traced to hosts somewhere on the SAN swamping the drives with polling traffic. If you have any Windows systems in the SAN that very well may be the problem.

[daosheng]

The received errors from the backup server was: prob time out, then marked the driver status to "NO_HW". And at the same time there was a critical error in the CMTL event log. All the server connect to this library are marked theses 2 drivers NO_HW.
The 2 failed drivers are not on the same controller card and no windows system in the SAN.

All the driveres are worked well and no changes to like Zoning, cabling etc.