high available Tape Drives

[Pradeep_25]

1) are there any Tape Drives/Libraries that say they are highly available and no single point failure
2) is high avilability possible in Tape Drives/libraries?
3) are there any drives that give multiple paths to a Tape Drive(/a drive in a library) ?

-pradeep

[Ranjith_5 · Accepted solution]

Hi Pradeep,


HP StorageWorks ESL9000 Series Tape Libraries are having High availability features.

see http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/esl9000/index.html


regards,
Syam

[Pradeep_25]

is there any multy pathing solution for HP StorageWorks ESL9000

[Vincent Fleming]

Sorry, No multi-pathing to tape drives.

Generally speaking, tape backup is not a critical-path operation - the server's daily operation does not depend on the tape unit(s) being there, like it does with disk drives, so nobody has really bothered developing a multi-pathing solution for tapes.

What are you trying to do that you would need tape drives that are so highly available? Most apps that require such are actually better suited to using something like an MSA1500 with those big ATA drives; the cost/MB is close to that of tape, and the performance is better, and it has full redundancy.

-Vince

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Pradeep ,

There are a lot of SAN enabled libraries available. ESL9000 is the highest configuration ou of HP libraries with SAN capabilities. The library will be connected to the media server ( where the backup software is loaded,ie;veritas,DP etc) with multiple DC cables. So dont worry about Redundancy. Any way this type of libraries are used only in a hifi setup, in which the all servers, storages and backup devices will be on a FC environment.

see an IBM product with all these facilities. (IBM 3584 Tape Library)

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/tape/3584/index.html

I have used this product and found it very much reliable.

regards,
Syam

[Ranjith_5]

There were spelling mistakes in last post ( Pls read DC as FC.)
============================================

see (IBM 3584 Tape Library). It says it has got Multi-Path Architecture.

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/tape/3584/index.html

I have used this product and found it very much reliable.

regards,
Syam

[Uwe Zessin]

Multipath tape is not so easy as it might sound. Remember that a disk operation can easily be retried, but a tape uses a sequential medium.

[Peter Mattei]

In my opinion the library robotics is the most critical part in a tape library.
Thus multipathing for the robotics has priority.
The drives can be split to two redundant fabrics.

Multipathing for tape drives is tricky because tapes timeouts are fatal.
A failover solution needs to be supported by the backup application as well in order to do retries and recover from timeouts.

DataProtector will support drive failover sometime this year and already supports multipathing/failover for the robotics of the ESL e-series.
In order to do that the robotics needs two independent FC ports going to two fabrics. So the e1200 FC interface has to be replaced by an e2400 interface controller.
In the attached pdf you find how this will be done!

Cheers
Peter

[Peter Mattei]

Uups, the pdf was >1MB.
Therefore you find pages 1-4 above and 5-8 here

Cheers
Peter

[Pradeep_25]

i was wondering if a Virtual Tape would help a lot to solve some issues.

Tapes Backup is slow, if Fabric fails and if drive is not reachable, entire backup need to be restarted.

if i have a virtual tape with multipathing, wouldn't Backup be easy?

please tell me if i am missing something or if you have any suggestions/inputs?

-pradeep