We have tested last week
Qlogic new SANsurfer (SANBlade Manager) V2.0.24
and (IMHO) persistent binding works perfectly
(altough it seems that this is
the 1st working version ever for Win*)

But persistent binding has not been any help
in our Windows NetWorker environment :-(
With persistent binding you'll able to bind
WWPNs to SCSI-addresses (that's what it is made for)
NetWorker unfortunately uses DriveNames
in the form of "\\.\TapeX", and Windows
will generate these names independently
from SCSI adresses
(i.e.: if you lose one tape, after reboot
  the SCSI adresses are still O.K.,
  but the "\\.\TapeX"-names may have changed)


and now back to the basic thread.

1st I agree with TL, that there is no need for
  specialised Tape-SANs

2nd as almost, it depends if it will be a good
  choice to add some HBAs for more devices on the SAN

as mentioned above, we've done some testing last week
 to overcome these "recomendations":

 environment: IBM ESS, McData6064, IBM LTO3584, QLA2200F

we've tested 3 reasons to add more HBAs:
1) performance issues
  with LTO-2 and ESS it seems to be likely, that one could
  get more then 50 MB/sec write I/O to the tape, if the same
  adapter must handle read I/O there seems to be a bottlenek
  (which of course could be solved with 2Gbps HBAs)
2) configuration issues
  IBM "recommends" different setups for "ESS-HBAs" and
  "LTO-HBAs" (FC-taps support, retry counter, ...)
  <but we have decided to use a mix instead, and it works
   perfectly>
3)possible interactions between disk- and tape-addressing
  during the tests we haven't found any interactions,
  adding / removin ESS-disks will not influence tape addressing
  unfortunately "persistent binding" will not solve our
  "\\.\TapeX"-addressing problem

Finaly we've decided to go with TWO and not 3 or 4!

Anyone solved the "\\.\TapeX"-problem in a W2K environment?


Steffen Gattert
--
MOMENTUM Systech - Hamburg, Germany

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