Connecting an External DLT to a CL380

[Ayman Altounji]

I am trying to hookup an external DLT8000 drive to my CL380 and I am a bit confused as to which adapter to connect to? I am using Veritas 8.6 Backup Exec and since my CL380 is my file server I would like for the DLT to be attached to the cluster.

Do I just have to attach the DLT to one of the nodes and bite the bullet if and when that node goes down?

There is a SCSI adapter on the back of the cluster, facing the back of the server all the way up in the left hand corner, can this be used for the DLT?

Any help will be greatly appreciated....

Patrick Harrold

[Ayman Altounji]

Look at this PDF, installation instructions. Aso notes below:

You can not do a multiconfigurator setup (one drive attached to both nodes) because failover will not occur properly without a library to mount new "available" media. The documentation that I have attached in PDF format should be of some help. This is a mixture of documentation for CL380 and DL380. The standalone part at the end might be of interest. This is a CL380 so there will be no need to install another SCSI controller.

Using the CL380 there should be an unused VHDCI port on a dual port slotted pci ultra2 controller.
There may or may not be a yellow sticker that says "do not use". You can safely ignore this warning.

If you use the 68 pin connector in the bottom left of the server you will be connecting up to the ROC controller. If you do this you will need to remove the SCSI cable from the corresponding internal SCSI port or you will get a cabling error. Given the choice I would connect to the extra VHDCI SCSI port referenced to above.

DO NOT use the 68 pin connect in the top left corner. That is there to expand drive storage off or your shared storage array.

If you really want backup failover redundancy then you will need to have 2 drives connected independently to both servers. Install the Backup Exec software on the shared storage and create driver pools. Assign you back jobs to the new driver pool. This will provide redundancy but one drive will always be idle. Refer to the attached pdf in the stand alone drives section for a little more detail.

Bottom line is this..... With the configuration that you have. Only one drive. You can connect it up without purchasing another controller but you will not have a Failover Cluster Backup solution. If one node fails you will need to physically connect the drive to the other node and reinstall the software to do backups.

[Ayman Altounji]

If you were connecting a library (TL891 or SSL2020), it is possible to have failover for backups. Attached is the link for more information. http://www.compaq.com/products/storageworks/tape-and-optical-storage/cluster-backup.html