ADSM-L

Re: 2 fibre interfaces per drive

2003-11-17 17:49:45
Subject: Re: 2 fibre interfaces per drive
From: Steve Harris <Steve_Harris AT HEALTH.QLD.GOV DOT AU>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 08:48:41 +1000
Joni,

Later versions of the Atape driver support dual pathing and failover.
Once set up, AIX defines two RMTn drives for each physical drive, one with a 
device path ending in -PRI and the other in -ALT.

As I understand it rudimentary load balancing is done - when the tape is 
opened, the least busy path is used.

Failover is also neat.  I was running the tapeutil test command and 
deliberately varied off the adapter in use.  The io just picked up where it 
left off on the other path. 

See the Totalstorage Tape Installation and Users Guide, available from 
ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com  for details

Steve Harris
AIX and TSM Admin
Queensland Health, Brisbane Australia

>>> Julian.Armendariz AT HBFULLER DOT COM 18/11/2003 7:13:13 >>>
IBM 3590 and 3592 drives have 2 fibre interfaces.  I am unsure how to
manage the multipathing yet, but we are going to look at configuring our
3590H drives that way next year to eliminate that single point of
failure.  Our TSM server is running AIX 5.2ML2 which is connected to a
3494 library with 4 3590H drives which are connected to a Brocade 2800.


Julian Armendariz
System Engineer - UNIX
H.B. Fuller
(651) 236-4043



>>> joni.moyer AT HIGHMARK DOT COM 11/17/03 12:48PM >>>
Hi everyone!

We are in the process of formulating an AIX environment instead of our
current MVS TSM environment.  We would have 2 TSM servers (one being
the
library manager) with 2 directors, 8 lan-free clients and 24 tape
drives,
which we hope to share between the 2 TSM servers.  We would like to
have 2
fibre interfaces per drive in order to eliminate a single point of
failure.
My question is, how does TSM know which path it is using to the drive
and
how does it know that one of the paths to an individual drive is
already in
use?  Is there software out there to manage this or is it done through
the
hardware configuration?  If anyone has any suggestions I would
appreciate
it!  Thanks!


***************************************************************
Joni Moyer
Highmark
Storage Systems
Work:(717)302-6603 **New as of 11/1/03
Fax:(717)302-5974
joni.moyer AT highmark DOT com 
***************************************************************



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