Mel,
Even if we can point you to the drivers, the only time you would
know whether they were going to work or not was when you went to test, and
it would always be a point of worry any time you put on TSM or OS patches if
it was going to suddenly break your DR plan. In the middle of a DR
situation is the wrong time to find out about incompatibilities.
I had to do this very thing with DLT4000 drives (many years ago
now), where I had to bring a laptop with a SCSI cable and DLT firmware
update utility to our DRP tests, and save and reload the DLT firmware on the
DLT4000 drives provided by our DR vendor, so I could be sure they were the
same firmware rev. as the ones we had in production, otherwise they would
have problems reading the tapes. I had no way around this problem at the
time, but it was a kludge of the first order. We wasted six months and two
DR tests getting past this problem before we could do our first successful
restore.
My recommendation to you is to go back to SunGard and explain the
situation, and insist on IBM LTO2 drives. They may be stand-alone drives
not in a library, but that is better than messing around with drivers you
can't be sure of. You can always mount the tape drives by hand in a DR
situation. That is a small price to pay to get your data back. Make sure
you keep reasonably up to date with the firmware on your drives, and expect
SunGard to keep reasonably up to date with theirs.
Best Regards,
John D. Schneider
Technology Consultant - Backup, Recovery, and Archive Practice
EMC² Corporation, 600 Emerson Road, Suite 400, St. Louis, MO 63141
Phone: 314-989-3839 Cell: 314-225-9997 Email: Schneider_JohnD AT emc DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Dennis, Melburn W IT743
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 8:25 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] LTO Drivers for TSM
Recently our company ran a DR Test with a company called SunGard. Our
contract requested an automated tape library with LTO2 drives in order
for us to execute our TSM portion of the disaster recovery. In our
production environment we use IBM LTO2 drives. When we got there we
found out that they had HP LTO2 drives, and so the drivers that we had
brought with us in our DR tool kits would not work. SunGard was able to
provide us the latest drivers from HP, but those seemed to not be
compatible with TSM, and the generic drivers that come bundled with TSM
did not work either. TSM would recognize the drives as "GENERIC TAPE"
instead of LTO. In the future we would like to be able to prevent this
in case of a real DR, and have a set of drivers that would work with all
major manufacturers of LTO. What drivers for HP LTO drives work with
TSM, or for that matter any other manufacturer of LTO besides IBM?
Mel Dennis
Systems Engineer - IT743
Siemens Power Generation
4400 Alafaya Trail
Orlando, FL 32826
MC Q1-108
Tel: (407) 736-2360
Win: 439-2360
Fax: (407) 243-0260
Email: melburn.dennis AT siemens DOT com
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