Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] multipathing with tapes on Linux?

2011-07-27 17:03:58
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] multipathing with tapes on Linux?
From: Len Boyle <Len.Boyle AT sas DOT com>
To: David Magda <dmagda AT ee.ryerson DOT ca>, "Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu" <Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:03:51 +0000
David, 

I think the answer depends on what you mean by multi-pathing, and the maker of 
the tape drive.

The new IBM tape drives include two ports. But I think that it is only for 
failover. And I suspect that the support would only be in the IBM tape driver. 
Which  was released with it's source code the last I looked.

I also suspect that you do not need multi-pathing to feed the tape drives.  The 
 native speed for  a lto-5 tape drive is greater than that of a gige card. And 
if you send data that can be compressed 2-1 or 3-1 then  even more so. 

The hard part is getting the data off the disk fast enough to drive the tape 
drive.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu 
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of David 
Magda
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2011 4:45 PM
To: Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] multipathing with tapes on Linux?

Hey,

Anyone know if Linux (specifically RHEL 5.x) supports multi-pathing to tapes? 
Is it worth setting up a media server with a 10 GigE interface and two (or 
more) FC connections on the other?

AFAICT, the "device-mapper-multipath" only support MPIO for block devices.
Is this assessment correct?

Thanks for any info.

Regards,
David


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