I'm not quite sure I know what you mean by 'defining logical tape drives',
without a VTL or somesuch. Can you expand technically upon what you mean?

>From my experience, the majority of failures involving tape drives have been
down to drive/head mechanics failure or tape cartridge errors (although I
note that this seems to be increasingly uncommon these days), rather than
physical fiber component failure. In these instances, any amount of
multi-pathing can't help and you need to make sure that you have enough
spare capacity in your library/design to cope, and an alerting/support
process in place which can recognise it and get it resolved as quickly as
possible. Given that most of your backup clients will (presumably) initially
write to TSM-managed disk storage pools (except SAN Storage Agents and
perhaps NDMPs etc) hopefully a drive failure won't have a direct impact upon
a client backup data integrity, as TSM tends to be pretty precious about
this when performing migrations/data movement operations involving tapes.

/DMc

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Mehdi Salehi
Sent: 11 October 2009 17:13
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] MPIO for tape libraries

Thanks David, you made a good point about single fiber connections of LTO
drives. Does defining logical tape drives helps eliminating this single
point of failure such that if during client backup the fiber connection of
drive fails, another tape drive in the library takes over the operation?

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