We are thinking about buying some IBM 3592-E05 tape drives for the Open System group (well, actually, it's comming out of their budget), and we will put them in our, yet to be purchased IBM 3494 robotics unit. The tape drives will be dedicated to a FC SAN thingie.
Apparently, we can attach the mainframe to the FC SAN thingie, using FCP connections. Then, zLinux can have access to them. As FCP tape drives are not known to VM. And I have some 20-30 Linux images running under VM, what is the procedure to attach/detach these tape drives to each image? Or is it something stupid, like I have to dedicate the drives to one machine and then backup over vswitch from one machine to another to the tape drives? (I say stupid, as backing up over "communications" usually takes more resources than backing up over hardware....directly to the drives.) Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting
