Josh,

1.      You can have 2 fiber connections per tape drive.  Each with a
separate device.  The first cfgmgr will show one path and the second will
show the second path.
2.      I believe AIX can do this with multiple device path, but I am not
sure of specifics.
3.      I would make sure to use many tape drives and watch the switch with
"portperfshow" to detect any bottom necks created with 36 tape drive on a
SAN.  Also to tell exactly the SAN device you are talking to "lscfg  -vl
rmt1"

        What advantage do you hope to gain from multi-pathing?

Jeff Bach
Home Office Open Systems Engineering
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

WAL-MART CONFIDENTIAL


        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Joshua S. Bassi [SMTP:jbassi AT IHWY DOT COM]
        Sent:   Tuesday, September 25, 2001 1:24 PM
        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        Subject:        FC Tape Drive Multi-Pathing?

        All,

        Does anybody know if there is any way to setup tape drives (Magstar
in
        particular) for dynamic multi-pathing?  I have a customer who is
        deploying 35 Magstar FC based drives in a SAN environment behind 2
        Brocade 6400 switches.  There will be 6 RS6K 4.3.3 TSM servers
sharing
        the drives using tape library sharing.  Each host will have at least
2
        FC cards for tape and 2 for the disk environment.  Multi-pathing the
        disk subsystem is easy, but I have never heard of a way to set it up
for
        tape drives.


        --
        Joshua S. Bassi
        Independent IT Consultant
        IBM Certified - AIX/HACMP, SAN, Shark
        Tivoli Certified Consultant- ADSM/TSM
        Cell (408)&(831) 332-4006
        jbassi AT ihwy DOT com


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