AIT 50 drive and RAID card.

[Matthew Hargraves]

One of my clients purchased 2 DL380 G2 servers a while ago. They purchased an AIT 50 drive in each system and Compaq installed it in a hot-swap slot, on a RAID card. As I hope some people here know, tape drives and RAID cards don't really like each-other much.

As a result of the AIT 50 drives being on the built-in RAID cards, Veritas Backup Exec 8.6 does not finish any jobs. Don't get me wrong, the job does finish, it just never actually completes. Everything backs up, the verify goes through fine, but after the tape ejects the job sits at 99% forever. I end up having to go in every morning, usually remotely, and cancelling out the job.

Does anyone know if there is a workaround for this? BTW: Yes, I have talked to Veritas, they said that they don't support running a tape drive on a RAID card and neither does ArcServe, though that's largely irrelevant, since they're not running ArcServe. The boot drives are on hot swap slots running in a RAID 1 configuration, so it's not like we can just change the configuration of the hot plug module to not include a RAID controller.

Thanks for any help,
Matt

[Greg Carlson]

Matthew,

Are you looking for a workaround for keeping the tape on the RAID controller?

You need to move the AIT onto a SCSI HBA. Here are the Compaq cards:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/adapters/index.html

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/adapters/66mhz-single/index.html

The AIT 50 page recommends the 32bit Fast SCSI-2 or greater controller. ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/techdoc/tapestorage/155450e3.pdf


Ciao,
Greg