StoreEver LTO-7 Ultrium 15000 SAS Internal Tape Drive Third party Compatibility

[umair3]

Hi,

Dear We have Dell Servers with the below specification, and we are planning to buy "StoreEver LTO-7 Ultrium 15000 SAS Internal Tape Drives" to connect with Dell Servers

Existing Dell Server Specs:

Dell PowerEdge T430 Tower Chassis for Up to 8x 3.5" HDDs

Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 v4 - 2.20GHz/3.10 GHz, 25M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, HT, 10Core/20T (85W)

32GB RDIMM, 2400T/s, Dual Rank, x8 Data Width

4X Dell 2TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gbps 3.5in Hot-plug Hard Drive,13G, CusKit

PERC H330 Integrated RAID Controller

8x DVD+/-RW Drive SATA

Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant Power Supply 495W

Broadcom 5720 Quad Port 1Gb Network Card

Intel X550 Dual Port 10G Base-T Adapter, Full Height

iDRAC8 Express Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller, Express

So my question is that would i be able to get the HP Tape drives working with the above Dell Servers or do i need any changes related to the "PERC H330 Integrated RAID Controller"??? Actually my Vendor saying that this would work but i am confused as i didnt find any confirmation or denial over the Internet regarding this. Please reply. Thanks.

[Torsten.]

You should ask the vendor if this controller supports tape drives.

It depends also if you want to use internal or external drives. The server must support an internal tape drive and the connections needed in that case.

[umair3]

Hi, well vendor is unable to satisfy, the internal tape drive comes with SFF8087 to SFF8082 cable, in this case SFF8087 is standard connector which is pluggable on DELL PERC H330 Raid Controller, moreover PERC H330 is series 9 raid controller and can be configured to HBA mode. but i need to confirm this first from anyone who has experience and have done such already. Thanks.

[tapelibraryfixr]

i beleive there 2 variants of the H330, one integrated and one being a pcie card, as you seem to have the integrated i doubt it has any connections to connect to the card itself. and if its the pcie card then the connections are internal anyway so youd need a perticular cable.

would be easier getting a LSI/avago/broadcom SAS 9300-8e card and sas cable.

also why not just buy a dell LTO7, same thing i know but atleast it would go with your system and be properly supported

[umair3]

Hi, thanks for mentioning regarding variants of H330, secondly if i go for DELL LTO 7 external tape drive does this come with cable that could connect to "Dell SAS 12Gbps HBA External Controller, Full Height, CusKit – 405-AADZ". or do i have to get separate cable to connect these?

Regards,

[Torsten.]

consider to ask dell ...

[HamzaZuberi]

Replying on behalf of the OP, we successfully installed HPE Ultrium 15000 on Dell T430 (using H330 controller in HBA mode, via SFF8482-SFF8643 SAS cable), installed HPE drivers on Windows 2016, but got a block size error (that the H330 HBA installed does not support the required block size of 512k) when trying to create a mapping for the drive. We dug into forums but had no luck... we finally managed to work around this by installing tape driver 1.0.9.3 (using cp038070 installer), then overwriting it with driver 1.0.9.2 (using cp032931 installer). This works fine for a few reboots, then randomly stops reading the cartridge file system. To resolve this, we have to repeat the above process and reboot before it allows us to recreate the tape drive mapping. Once this is done, we can read the same tape cartridge perfectly well.

Any assistance in this regard would be highly appreciated!

[HamzaZuberi]

Just adding here: we have three servers with the same hardware and software configuration, and we are facing the same issue on all of them.