TSM & OmniBack on the same 6/60 library

[Matteo Pignoni_1]

Hi all,
is it possible to use the same 6/60 library with Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and OmniBack?
The problem is that TSM need his own spacial files and delete the original special files.
Thanks!

[Ted Ellis_2]

On the surface I say this is a bad idea. I would expect you to see some contention issues with the robot. Omniback does let you define lock files to prevent another logical instance of the same physical tape drive from being used at the same time, but I believe that is all intended to work from within Omniback and not across other applications. I would be interesting to see if you could try some physical separation.... assign some drives / slots to Omniback and the other drives / slots to TSM. Still have the issue of both applications trying to issue a command to the robot, so it sounds very risky at best.

May be worth a call to HP at any rate to verify support with this kind of configuration. Even if it were to work, HP may say this is not supported and then if it blows up on you....

Ted

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi
This is describer in the Administrators guide. It is not supported yet to share a library between two different applications. The problem is the library robotics, you can reserve some drives and slots for one application but both need acess to the robotics. And there is no lock mechanism for this implemented in OmniBack. I think the SCSI reserve/relese should be used but this is not functionally in OmniBack yet.

[Curtis Ballard]

It is possible to use two applications on the same library if you only configure the drives/slots that each application can use. I don't know if anybody has tried TSM and Omniback together however.

The robot contention isn't usually a problem if both applications are on the same host because most hosts will only send 1 SCSI command to a device at a time and automatically queue commands. HP-UX is great at doing this. If the applications are on different hosts the library controller will queue commands when possible but reserve/release is recommended and most apps don't use it properly.

Where there is a problem is if one application insists on running a fully library inventory and loading all the tapes into the a drive even though it has not been given access to those tapes.

As a previous poster mentioned however this is not a configuration supported by HP as there are just too many combinations to test.