Thanks for the answer.
Most of the thinks you mentioned can be done without I/O blades.
I can restart the drives within the i2K GUI. Robot control has its own host
masking so partitioning is not a problem.
I understand that I/O blades are more "powerful" but I'm not sour if I
really want them. I had asked this to a Quantum engineer and his only answer
is that with I/O blades you can upgrade the drive firmware easily.
Thanks again
-----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
william.d.brown AT gsk DOT com
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 1:17 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Scalar i2000 FC question
I can only comment on the library *with* the IO blades as that is how
we've always run it. So I really cannot say if the claims about the speed
buffering to even out data rates to the drives stack up. Nor can I say if
they are a bottleneck, though we are about to use 4 x LTO4 on each 4Gb
blade, so maybe we'll find out ;-)
What I can say they provide is excellent diagnostics and control. My
understanding is that with direct connect drives you don't get the ability
to reset and power cycle drives (could be wrong). With the blades we can
reset fibre ports, restart blades and do a lot of poking around that you
can't do with a drive. The drives are only having to run FC-AL within the
cabinet, so it's very lo-tech for the drives, insulated from the SAN.
I'm not sure how you manage partitions with no blades - how do you present
the robot controller LUN? The physical library then uses the fibre port
on the main controller card, not sure how multiple hosts would do that.
With the blades we just present the robot control LUN for each partition
down whatever fibre we like (with at least one of the partition's drives).
I don't know how many people use HRS - we found that it cannot work with
the Sun Leadville drivers, it required the native qla2300 drivers and that
was not an option for us. I'm sure HRS requires the IO blades.
A downside is that it can be rather mind-bending to configure them
initially.
William D L Brown
veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu wrote on 30/09/2009 08:58:16:
> Hi to all,
> May I ask if there is any significant benefit of using I/O blades or it
is
> just marketing?
>
> As I remember you can not put more than two LTO4 drives to the blades.
> Ok, you can but if you feed your drives with full speed .....
>
>
> -----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
tpcshadow
> Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 4:33 PM
> To: VERITAS-BU AT MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN DOT EDU
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Scalar i2000 FC question
>
>
> Thanks for the info! This library will only be attached to a single
server
> so we're going with a direct connection. There will be multiple FC
> connections, so now I know to distribute them across all IO blades with
> attached drives.
>
> Thanks,
> Thomas
>
>
> I believe the firmware is 575A-GS00101
>
>
>
> Wheeler, Gideon wrote:
> > Hi,
> > No cross blade routing is allowed So the masking will only work within
> > each blade. This doesn't prevent you from presenting 4 tapes drives
down
> > 1 FC port.
> > To present more tape drives to a host you need to zone them in at the
> > switch side.
> > What version of the firmware are you using ?
> >
> > Hope this helps
> > Gideon
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu
> > [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces < at > mailman.eng.auburn.edu] On Behalf Of
> > tpcshadow
> > Sent: 27 September 2009 22:43
> > To: VERITAS-BU < at > MAILMAN.ENG.AUBURN.EDU
> > Subject: [Veritas-bu] Scalar i2000 FC question
> >
> >
> > I've been given the task of taking a used fibre channel Scalar i2000
and
> > putting it into production. I have no documentation except for the
users
> > guide I've downloaded from Quantum's web site.
> >
> > Does each FC I/O blade operate as an independent FC switch? As a test
I
> > have a host attached to the FC1 port on IO blade 3. The LUN masking
> > wizard only allows me to map tape drives attached to IO blade 3, but
> > cannot map or see tape drives on IO blade 4 or 5. Is there a way to
> > make LUN masking work across IO blades, or are connections limited to
> > the same IO blade?
> >
> >
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