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Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

 
Norm Pettigrew
Advisor

Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

Hi Folks, Have bouhgt a new MSL4048 LTO3 Tape Library with 2 Tape Drives replacing our StorageTek drive. We currently have our StorageTek which has a single Fibre connection to our EMC swithces and our backup host has a single Fibre connection to the same switch and has worked well for years.

With the new unit MSL4048 each drive has a Fibre Connection / World Wide Name etc and one of the drives acts as the master LUN for the library and my questions are is it possible to load balance these drives over 2 fibre connections to 2 different switches and do I zone the tape drive WWN's as I thought I would see 3 devices in the fabric 1 for the library and 2 drives but I just see the drives.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Regards, Norm
4 REPLIES 4
Marino Meloni_1
Honored Contributor

Re: Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

You cannot balance trafic to one drive via two path. Dual path is not supported. you should use only one FC connection at one time. You may connect also the second FC port from the same drive in case the first path fails, but you should be sure your backup application can manage this and use one and only one path at one time. Best thing is to only connect one FC port per drive and use zoning in the switch.
The robotic controller is managed though one of the drives, it will appear in your host as a LUN at the same scsi address as the Master drive.
Curtis Ballard
Honored Contributor

Re: Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

If you are asking "can I connect each drive to a different switch?" the answer is yes - you can connect the drives to different switches and load balance across two drives.

If you are asking about connecting both ports of the drives that has already been answered, you can only have one active port at a time and if your software doesn't handle it you have to manually zone out one port. Traffic can't be load balanced across multiple ports on a single tape drive as the tape drive is sequential.

Your OS should be able to see all three devices but your switch may only see two if it just publishes information about direct connected devices.
Hanry Zhou
Super Advisor

Re: Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

Curtis Ballard,


>If you are asking "can I connect each drive >to a different switch?" the answer is yes - >you can connect the drives to different >switches and load balance across two drives.

are you saying the same backup could write to two different drives by 2 different zones(paths)? if one path lost, could backup contiue to write to another drive?
none
Curtis Ballard
Honored Contributor

Re: Zoning MSL4048 Tape Library with 2 Drives

If you put two different tape drives into two different zones and back up to both then when one path goes down you will still have access to the other drive.

Whether or not your backups that would have gone to drive one can still run on drive two is dependent on how you have your backup application set up and which application you are using. Some applications can have a preferred drive and a secondary drive and write to the secondary drive if the preferred drive is down.