zoning design

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I have a server with two dual-port FC HBA connecting to tape system with eight LTO6 drives through IBM SAN24B-4 (same as Brocade 300). This is single switch solution. I have a question regarding the zoning. What is the best zoning scheme for my case?

1.  create four zones (A, B, C, D) - one port on FC HBA and two tape drives belong to same zone

2.  create four zones (A, B, C, D) - one port on FC HBA and eight tape drives belong to same zone

3.  Is any link aggregation, teaming, HA I can configure to balance the load?

4. Any other solution?

Please help me to figure out the best SAN topology.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Is any link aggregation, teaming, HA I can configure to balance the load?

This depends on the drive and software used.

So basically you have one server with 4 fc ports and 8 lto6 drives and a switch

Without any knowledge about the rest of your setup or expectation, I would create zoning as follows.

fcport1<>tapedrive1

fcport1<>tapedrive2

fcport2<>tapedrive3

fcport2<>tapedrive4

fcport3<>tapedrive5

fcport3<>tapedrive6

fcport4<>tapedrive7

fcport4<>tapedrive8

If it's a bit over the top you can consolidate to 4 zones for each fcport

This gives you at least some degree of control. The thing you don't want is all data to the tape-drives to be handled by just one fcport, this would starve your LTO6 drives from IO

[Anonymous]

Hi Dion,

Thank you for your input. I am using Tivoli to access the tape drives and I have created the zones exactly same as what you mentioned.  I was just wondering if there is other ways to (potentially) increase the tape drive usage in case of connection problem - Ex. tapedrive1 & 2 will be offline if fcport1 fail. Do you have a better solution?

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

If Tivoli support it you could create additional zones like

fcport2<>tapedrive1

fcport2<>tapedrive2

fcport3<>tapedrive3

fcport3<>tapedrive4

fcport4<>tapedrive5

fcport4<>tapedrive6

fcport1<>tapedrive7

fcport1<>tapedrive8

And configure the drives within tivoli as a drive with an alternate path (if supported)

[Antonio Bongiorno T…]

I've a customer that use Tivoli and have a lot of Tape in Productive a DR site, I've lost the count.

Tivoli can handle each Tape as a single Device, however if I'm not wrong you need some features active in Tivoli

I would suggest to open a Call with Tivoli, this is a bit complexed, or you get a BackUp/recovery mismatch in a case the driver are not configured correctly.

[Anonymous]

Hi TechHelp24,

I look over IBM tape device driver and configured path failover and load balancing. However, I now have a problem to define the path to the tape drive in TSM. I can see 32 devices (/dev/IBMtape**) on TSM server - 8 from primary, 24 from other alternate path. I believe without virtual tape device how I can define the path to appropriate drive in case of failover and load balancing. This may not be correct forum to ask this question. But if you know the answer to my question, please help me.