It is best practice to put one initiator and one target in each zone. It may seem cumbersome but its really not that bad. You'll be happy you did it if you ever have SAN problems down the road. I have seen one device take out all other devices within the same zone before, more than once. Just pick a good naming convention for your zones so you can tell exactly what is in each zone just from the name. I also prefer to use aliases so when you replace a HBA or tape drive you just update the alias with the new PWWN instead of going in and changing 20 different zones.
***Please note new address, phone number, and email below*** ______________________________ John Monahan Consultant Logicalis 5500 Wayzata Blvd Suite 315 Golden Valley, MN 55416 Office: 763-417-0552 Cell: 952-221-6938 Fax: 952-833-0931 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.us.logicalis.com "Schneider, John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> 02/06/2007 05:05 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> To ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU cc Subject Tape drive zones for FC drives - best practices Greetings, My habit in regards to zoning FC tape drives has always been to put one host HBA in a zone with all the tape drives it should see, and to have a separate zone for each host HBA. For example, in a situation with 2 host HBAs and 10 tape drives, I would have two zones, one with one host HBA and 5 tape drives, and the other with the other host HBA and 5 tape drives. Pretty simple. But an IBM consultant working here is telling me that the best practice is to have a separate zone for each HBA/tape drive pair. So in my example above, I would have 20 zones instead of two. His claim is that an individual tape drive can hang all the other drives if they are in the same zone, but not if they are in separate ones. Has anyone seen this in real life? This becomes important to me because I am about to put in new SAN switches, and he wants me to follow this recommendation. I have 2 TSM servers with 4 HBAs each, 4 NDMP nodes, and 14 tape drives. Using my scheme, I would have 12 zones, with his scheme I would have 56 zones. That seems like a lot of zones, and unnecessarily cumbersome. Is it really necessary to isolate each HBA/Tape drive into a separate zone? Do individual tape drives really hang other drives in their zone? Best Regards, John D. Schneider Sr. System Administrator - Storage Sisters of Mercy Health System 3637 South Geyer Road St. Louis, MO. 63127 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office: 314-364-3150, Cell: 314-486-2359