Jukebox drives dedicated to a storage node 1

[julianbarnett]

Hi - we have a SAN connected Scalar I2K with 10 LTO4 drives attached to a CPU bound Solaris Networker server.

I tried using DDS to share out some of the drives to a SAN connected AIX storage Node and alleviate the load on the Solaris server. However, using this configuration, if the server is already writing to the shared drives, the Storage Node doesn't get a look in.

Is it feasible, with a non-partitioned library, to have the Robot and 6 of the drives dedicated to the Networker server and the remaining 4 dedicated to the AIX storage node?

e.g. Solaris --> Library controller scsidev@x.y.z
Solaris --> /dev/rmt/0cbn
...
...
Solaris --> /dev/rmt/5cbn
AIX --> storage_node:/dev/rmt6.1
...
AIX --> storage_node:/dev/rmt9.1

I understand an alternative would be to create tape pools only accessible to the Storage Node available to the shared drives, but I was hoping to avoid complicating our media management any further

 

[605]

The first thing i would look at is the "storage node" attribute for the client(s). Make sure that it states the AIX server first.

However, if the tape is already mounted at the server this selection and the pool fits, this selection may be overwritten. If in doubt, unload the media first.

 

[julianbarnett]

Thanks for that.

I have configured the last 2 drives in the jukebox solely with AIX device paths - will see how it runs tonight. I think the DDS option confused me - I thought it was the only way a libraray could be shared between server and storage node.

 

[605]

No - DDS is what you need to configure shared devices. But what you want to do is known as jukebox sharing. Actually. what you create is a kind of 'partial' jukebox.

 

[a060463xyz]

If you want to mnake such a static distribution of the devices you dont need dds.
But you can solve your problem with san-Zoning.
I dont know this paticular type of scalar Library but if the drives are native fc drives Zone the first six to your Networker Server and the other four to your storage node.
If you have scsi Drives with a fc-storage-router you can create "maps" on your fc-storage-router to present the first six drives to host a and the other to host b.

 

[julianbarnett]

Thanks for those replies - you are right I need jukebox sharing. For flexibility we have zoned all drive paths to both the servers and storage nodes but then configured Networker to use the desired path via the rmt devices. In other words with 2 HBAs per server, Networker inquire can see 20 paths to the 10 drives on both Solaris and AIX. Matching the serial no. that inquire returns to the rmt device we can then configure the jukebox with the devices that give us the best resilience and I/O balance. Also gives us the opportunity of simply reconfiguring the Jukebox without rezoning if we lose a path.

 

[denisfr]

Hello,

you can 'divide' this physical silo into two (or more) logical silos (partitions), which can access drives, slots, cap independantly.

Then you can perform a channel zoning in order to allow access to a partition by a specific hba.