sharing 660ex jukebox

[Razmik Zargarian]

Adaptec 2944UW controller, according to Adaptec, will enable two compuetrs to share a SCSI device (2944UW Installation Guid page 3) by using a jumper on the card (J4).

Assuming that the controllers will work as Adaptec has described, would I be able to share a SureStore 660ex jukebox (4 drives)using this method? How will it work? Has anyone done this before?
Thanks

P.S. This thread has been moved from Storage > General to Optical Jukeboxes & Drives. - Hp Forum MOderator

[John Griffith_3]

Hello Razmik,

The short answer to your question is that yes, this is true.

The rest of the story is that it becomes very complex in terms of accessing and controlling the devices. It's not something that will work without a 3'rd party software application.

The primary reason for this ability was for the use of Microsoft Clustering as well as MC Service Guard High availability (on HPUX).

Feel free to send me an email if you have more specific questions, of if you have the need for a cluster/High Avail system you should contact your HP MO sales rep.

Thanks,
John

[Razmik Zargarian]

Thanks John;

Yes we will use a 3rd party software for this setup.
Here is a bit more info on what our plans are so far.

We have two servers, MS Windows 2000 Advanced server. We have configured MS Cluster on both servers. We have SQL 2000, clustered, on both servers. An Adaptec 2944UW controller is installed on each server. Controller on server 1 and controller on server 2 will be on the same SCSI chain (one will have SCSI ID 7, the other will have SCSI ID 6, the 660ex library and 4 optical drives have SCSI IDs 0 to 4, seven SCSI IDs in total, with the J4 jumper set we should have correct termination on both controllers even when one server is powered down).
We will install FileNet Image Server 3.6 on these servers (as a clustered application, only active on one node at a time). Only one server will need to access (read/write) to the jukebox.
We "think" that when the servers are booted (one at a time), the active node (the one that holds the services and applications) will have access to the jukebox (this is the simple part), but when the resources (FileNet and SQL) failover to the second node, the jukebox will now be "available" to the second node for read/write requests.

Does this sound like a "workable" plan? Can you (or others) suggest a better method with what we have got? Where do you see a potential problem?

Thanks again

[Robert Janas]

I saw your message and what you were attempting to do and wondered if you had any feedback on your plan, or whether you have been able to implement it.

We are in a nearly identical situation and I'm curious how you were going to physically connect the servers to the Jukebox. I've been trying to locate a "Y-cable" to accomplish this, but I haven't found anything.

I'd appreciate any information you might have.