Adding a second Tape drive in MSL 4048 Library

[Henry Koko]

Hi all,

I installed a second Tape drive Altrium LT04 in my Library. How do I add it in data protector GUI. Im using DP 6.1. The cell manager server is on HP-UX 11i V3. The tape drive is connected to the SAN switches using fibre cables.

[thomasr]

I haven't used the HPUX version of Data Protector, but if the GUI is at all the same...

Pull down the "Devices & Media" context.

Expand the "Devices" link and then the library itself under "Environment" by clicking on the plus signs.

Right-click on "Drives" and select "Add Drive". You'll be able to give it whatever name you wish -- preferably, something close to, but not the same as, the existing drive.
Also select "Multipath" if appropriate.

Click 'Next'. Pull down the drop-down list box to select the address of the drive. Indicate if it's a Fibre Channel attach drive.

You'll want to examine the other properties pages as well and select boxes as appropriate. Select "Finish", and you're done.

If you only have one or a few backup jobs, you could also delete the current library and rediscover... but then you'll have to re-inventory the library (easy) and change the backup target on your backup jobs (not too hard, and you may want to do this anyway, to spread jobs across both tape drives).

-----------
On another note entirely -- if encryption is important to you (what's the cost should a backup tape go missing?), don't forget that Data Protector 6.1 can send an encryption key to an LTO-4 tape drive and the drive will encrypt all the data for that backup job with essentially no overhead (either performance or compression).

Or, for greater security, the MSL Encryption Kit is available to enable out-of-band encryption controlled through the library GUI (more security because the keys are truly random keys, thus considered unbreakable, and, the device requires both the library password and the encryption kit password to change the encryption policy. So if no one holds both passwords, a single person can never create an unencrypted tape.).