Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with running Fibre Channel
attached TSM tape drives over long distances using any kind of channel
extension. Specifically, we are looking at TSM 4.2 on AIX 4.3.3 with STK
9310 Libraries and 9840 fiber attached drives, but experience with any
environment would be helpful.

We would be using Brocade switches to connect the local TSM servers to the
local tape drives in a SAN fabric, then connecting some kind of channel
extenders (we're looking at CNT, but it could be FC over IP, etc) to the
switches to extend the FC fabric to another site. At the alternate site, we
would have an identical setup. The idea would be to either implement
Gresham's EDT DistribuTAPE to enable library sharing across sites, or have
each TSM server talk to both onsite and offsite libraries (with dedicated
drives instead of library sharing).

Any information or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Patrick Varney
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Fairfield Information Operations Center (FFIOC)
Enterprise Services  Group (ESG), Senior Network Specialist
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