I think unlike Linux and Solaris, windows require every Tape Vendor to provide their own driver or some sort of a shim which then can use the default windows tape driver functionality.
For the autochanger or VTL roadmap, Nexenta guys can provide more insight into their plans. I looked into the SMC spec once and it felt that to do a full VTL, it will take much more than just the SCSI medium changer part. There is quite a bit of sing and dance that needs to go between the slots, media and the tape drives because these are different LUs that now need to talk to each other outside of the COMSTAR's LU provider interface. But still if there is an opensource project around it, I can certainly help out. Sumit ________________________________________ From: Marc Nicholas [geekyth...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 5:51 PM To: Sumit Gupta Cc: Erast; storage-discuss@opensolaris.org; Nick Subject: Re: [storage-discuss] Open Source VTL I think you really need to get SCSI autochanger support into it...otherwise its use-case is somewhat limited with traditional backup software, no? Is that on the roadmap? I did manage to connect the initiator to an XP machine via iSCSI, but the device isn't recognized as a "Removable Device". Thx. -marc On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Sumit Gupta <sum...@brocade.com<mailto:sum...@brocade.com>> wrote: It just simulates a generic Tape interface. It seem to work with Solaris and Linux initiators. I think Nexenta did some limited testing with Netbackup and it was able to identify the tape drive. I have not tested it with FC. FCP CONF and FCP-2 error recovery are not there in stt. But I don’t know if that will impact basic tape functionality. It will be interesting if someone can give that a try. Sumit ________________________________ From: storage-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org<mailto:storage-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org> [mailto:storage-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org<mailto:storage-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org>] On Behalf Of Marc Nicholas Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 1:48 PM To: Erast Cc: storage-discuss@opensolaris.org<mailto:storage-discuss@opensolaris.org>; Nick Subject: Re: [storage-discuss] Open Source VTL Erast, That's pretty awesome...I have it up and running already! It looks like drive type personalities are missing, though? That's pretty important for folks running traditional backup software (NetBackup, TSM, etc). Also, does it work over FCP too? Thx! -marc On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Erast <er...@gnusolaris.org<mailto:er...@gnusolaris.org>> wrote: Guys, just to let you know that Nexenta was working for quite some time on its COMSTAR VTape driver. It is now beta ready and feature complete as far as code is concerned: http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/vtape It requires b131+ to compile and run. Tested with NexentaStor and with many Backup vendors - results are very good. Yes, we hope to push this into OpenSolaris code base at some point and looking for Beta users. Originally code was contributed by Sumit Gupta, who is a well-know COMSTAR creator and former Sun's rock star! So, we sure that from design perspective our implementation is the best. Give it a try people! Cyril Plisko wrote: On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Marc Nicholas <geekyth...@gmail.com<mailto:geekyth...@gmail.com>> wrote: There's some embryonic work underway to provide a streaming device as a COMSTAR LU. This will achieve what you're looking for as far as devices. There is a project at Kenai (for the moment): http://kenai.com/projects/stmfssd that I believe Marc is referring to. I was somewhat hesitant about announcing it here due to uncertain Kenai future (thank you very much, Oracle), but I guess there is no real reason to keep silence. So, yes - the project aims creating virtual tape based on COMSTAR. Pretty much as Marc said it is in the early stage and contributions are very welcome. _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list storage-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
