Ultrium 448 sas tape unit not seen by Smart Array P800 sas controller

[Alan Buynak]

Hello all,

I purchased a DL385 G2 Proliant server and replaced the P400 controller with a P800 SAS controller so that I could use the internal connectors for SAS hard drives and an external port for a tape unit & future expansion. I updated the P800's firmware from version 2.04 to 2.08. The Ultrium tape unit is actually an internal unit which is installed in an HP 1U tape rackmount kit so the rackmount kit and P800 controller have an external SAS cable linking them.

When I boot from the CD provided from HP to manage the P800 and configure the disks, it doesn't "see" the tape unit.
1) Is this the expected behavior?
2) I never found any info that said that the P800 couldn't support tape units, but is the combination incompatible?

Under Linux I experimented with cciss and at one point I was able to backup a directory and then restore it, but once I rebooted the server the config was gone. Sadly, I don't remember how I got it to work so I haven't been able to duplicate it.

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

The QuickSpecs for the P800 here:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12616_div/12616_div.HTML

suggest that your configuration should work.

Can you look in the output of "dmesg" to see if there is any mention of the tape drive...?

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[Alan Buynak]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your reply. dmesg makes no reference to either the tape unit or the controller. Here's some of what I've looked at:
1) "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" simply says, "attached devices:".
2) Smartstart boot cd allowed me to see array, etc., but no tape unit.
3) Library & Tape Tools (hp_ltt) doesn't see it after the hardware scan.
4) insmod shows: "scsi_mod 117709 4 st,sg,cciss,sd_mod"

At this point I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't some kind of cabling/communication issue, and that maybe the one time I was able to backup/restore from the unit was a fluke.

The HP rackmount kit has no intelligence so there's nothing on it to check. It's designed to hold 2 tape units, each with it's own connector on the back. For now I only have the one tape unit, and I have an SAS cable (with SFF-8088 ends) which connects one of the external rackmount kit ports to one of the external ports on the P800 controller.

[Alan Buynak]

Using HP's Array Configuration Utility, I was able to prove that the P800 controller is in fact seeing the tape unit.