> 1. Take one of our IBM 3590 E11 drives, detach it from our current > Controller. > 2. Attach the drive to a fibre channel (was FICON but reconfigured as > FCP).
Doable, but requires a hardware change (different controller board on the drive). > Access the tape drive for backup/restore purposes from multiple Linux > images (we will manually make sure that only one image is actively > using the drive at any one time). Designate one host as your backup server and use a network based backup. Moving hardware around is a pain you don't need. > My impression is that there isn't different VSE/Linux tape drives. VSE > accesses the drive via a controller that has multiple 3590 drives > attached to it. And that a 3590 drive can be directly attached via FCP > to the Linux side. They are mechanically the same transport, but the electronics are different. > So, did I open my mouth an insert foot? Depends on whether your CE is a saint or not. It's not hard to swap the electronics, but it's tedious. Beer helps. 8-) > We are getting conflicting info on whether a SCSI switch is required, > or just a nice thing to have. If you can afford to use an entire channel for one device, you don't need a switch. Most people aren't that privileged. > Phase 2 will have us acquiring a couple IBM 3590 E11 drives > (autoloaders, if usable in Linux, is a good thing). Linux support for tape autoload usually assumes that tapes are in some kind of library robot separate from the drive (the old gravity-fed autoloaders work, but only in automatic mode and Linux doesn't know how to optimize for them). You end up sending commands to a separate SCSI device to move tapes into/out of drives. > I don't dare think we would ever get to a Phase 4 (some sort of backup > product/tape manager), but if some one get some grant money.... See above suggestion. Amanda and Bacula work pretty well, and the price tags are right. There's even inexpensive support for both. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
