MSL6030 - Fibre vs SCSI

[Sebastien L]

Hi,

There are times when i'm quite perplexed at my own ignorance of seemingly simple technologies, but hey, too many technologies, too little time... So here goes my problem.

Our current production environment uses an MSL6030 with two Ultrium 960 drives to run our backups, connected via fibre to a SAN, and ultimately, to the Windows 2003 server that runs TSM. Our disaster recovery site is made of another MSL6030 library, with one Ultrium 960 drive, connected via SCSI directly to the Windows 2003 server that has TSM installed. Not surprisingly i suppose, it seems i cannot read, at our DR site, any of the tapes that were created at our production environment. Not very good, as you might imagine.

-Why can't i read any of the tapes?
-Will i have to force my beloved management team to pony up some dough to get some fiber equipment at our DR site?
-Is there any way to fix this without resolving to sacrifices or voodoo?

Additional bits of info that might be useful
--------------------------------------------
-We run TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) 5.3.3 at both sites
-Servers are HP DL380 G4
-OS is Windows 2003 Standard SP2
-We don't do serverless backup, all the data travels through TSM on the Windows box, and is then transfered to tapes

And before you ask or wonder
----------------------------
-Yes, we use SCSI at the DR site to save money (management decision)
-No, i wasn't there when it was implemented (previous outsourcing company) and as far as i have discovered, it was obviously never tested.

Thanks a lot for any help you may provide,

Regards,

Sebastien

[Rothery Harris]

SCSI or Fibre Channel shoouls make no difference. FC protocol is only a layer and the commands are still SCSI. What may make a difference is if your sre backing up to 2 drives in parallel and then trying to read on a single drive. The other issue may be that you are using Windows drivers on one site and Tivoli on the other.
Try backing up to ONE fresh tape and then try reading it on the other site.
You could try HP Library & Tape Tools to run some tests.
Check the firmware versions of all the drives.