I personally think it's worth the effort, not so much for the fail-over but for the fact the Atape driver will do some HBA load balancing for you to maximize performance across less utilized HBA ports. We do have a few ProtecTier's in the mix and also a Windows 2008R2 based LAN Free server, the LF server actually utilizes some of this redundancy as well and the IBM Tape driver load balancing as well. For the VTL based devices what we typically do is rename the rmt entries in AIX based on their serial number since they've typically been just different drives behind the same front end WWPN's.
We're running 60 physical LTO5's and 128 emulated LTO3 devices from the PT for comparisons sake. With some scripts work wise it isn't too much more effort. ----- Original Message ----- Is it worth the work? Are there any VTLs involved? I may be doing 4 TSM servers to 18x 3952's, 8x LTO6 shared drives and 120x LTO1's for each server non-shared in multiple DataDomains. I also have LANFree clients that do not support redundant fabrics. Thank you, Andy Huebner -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Mike De Gasperis Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 8:44 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Redundant Tape SAN We utilize a redundant tape SAN at our main data centers with multiple host site HBA ports. Using the Atape control and data path fail-over options we have twelve device entries for each physical tape device. Works really well and this is in an AIX/LPAR/VIO environment, we've virtualized the HBA ports and are using NPIV. We have some scripts created that rename each rmt entry via chdev to utilize the last four digits of the WWPN and the AIX fiber channel adapter to make things easier to line up as well when defining drives in TSM. ----- Original Message ----- Is anyone using redundant tape SAN with TSM on AIX? Andy Huebner
