Fibre ports in MSL6060

[Balakrishna Kotian]

Hi Everybody,

Does anyone knows how many fibre ports does exist in MSL6060 with 8 drives. Each enclosure will hold 4 drives with 2 enclosure it will make 8 drives.
I wanted to know how many ports will be there in each enclosure. My worry is how will I connect the library in to fabric switch. will get 2 different path or it will be a single path. Suggest me how to connect MSL6060 to my 2x16port switch

Thank you for your time and effort.

Bala

[Steven Clementi]

Bala:


You should have 1 NSR per 2 drives in an MSL6060 library according to the Quickspecs.

That would meen you should have 4 NSR interfaces. Each interface has 1 fibre port and 2 SCSI ports.

General configuration would be to run the first 2 drives and the robotic controller off of the first NSR, the second pair of drives on the second nsr, and so on.

With that being said, you can not have multiple paths to your tape drives since there is only a single SCSI connection from each tape pair. I see no reason why you could not split up the NSR's to different fabrics, but that is about the best redundancy you can get aside from getting a second library.

On the larget libraries, the NSR is a bit different, having 2 fibre ports and 4 SCSI ports. These would allow you to attach an NSR on both fabrics, but I still believe that "multipathing" for tape drives is not yet supported.


Steven

[Balakrishna Kotian]

Hi Steven,

I think in my scenario library is getting directly connected to fabric switch without any router in between. This library comes with e1200-160 FC interface card for 2 drives.
we will have 4 drives in each enclosure does it make 2 e1200-120 FC card it means I will have 2 fibre ports here in first enclosure and 2 fibre ports in my second enclosure. So total will be 4 fibre ports, is that true or how does it will be? Just trying to imagine so that it will help me in zoning.

Bala

[Steven Clementi]

e1200-160 FC interface card = NSR


I have not worked with dual enclosures before, only the single 6060, but I would think you would have 2 FC interfaces per enclosure. 4 fibre ports total.

Again though... each interface only interacts with 2 drives, with the first interface also interacting with the robotic controller.

Theoretically, you can attach the first 2 drives to fabric A and the second 2 drives to fabric B, the first 2 in the second enclosure to Fab A and the second 2 to Fab B. This wold load balance your fabrics a little, but will NOT give you multipath to any single Tape Drive.



Steven

[Kurt Beyers.]

Bala,

Each NSR router has one fibre connection and two SCSI connections.

For eight drives, you would need 4 NSR routers.

The NSR router is not redundant itself.

However if you connect two routers to the first SAN switch and two routers to the second SAN switch, 4 drives remain available if one switch goes down. But if the robot arm can't be used any more (connected to the switch that is down), the drives won't offer a lot. So make sure that the two robot arms are connected to different switches too.

best regards,
Kurt