We actually do dual (or more) HBAs to SAN so we'll have redundance for
disks  (EMC Clariion/DMX) so can also SEE the tape drives on multiple
paths but only use one path for tapes.  Having your tape drives stay on
line isn't quite as critical as having your disk drives do it so we've
never seen the need to make the paths redundant.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces at mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of Dave
Markham
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 12:01 PM
To: veritas-bu at mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Multipathing San drives

Guys has anyone heard of trying to have resilient Tape drives over
fiber? Someone came and asked me saying a new install was going to be
specced having dual hba's providing 2 paths to the fiber attached tape
drives. Im talking Solaris here and an L500 with LTO2 drives.

I immediately couldnt see how it could work as Netbackup writes to tape
using the /dev/rmt/ devices presented on solaris. I know using disks and
mpxio etc you can multipath i/o to disks but is it possible to tape? I
just don't want to have told him we shouldn't be doing things like that
as its not possible in case it is.

Cheers
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