Whoo! IBM tape library!

We received an IBM 8583 LTO3 tape library today. It's a pretty nifty gadget, having 73 media slots, two LTO3 tape drives, a bar code reader, and a 2Gbps FibreChannel interface. It also has an I/O door you can open to insert and extract tapes without interrupting operation of the unit! And each tape stores a mind-blowing 400GB. Too bad we don't have the media yet, and I was only able to test with 200GB LTO2 tapes we already had...

I set up a temporary machine named "kitsune" to figure out how to get it all working. Unfortunately, I could get nothing but lots of errors from the Linux kernel concerning the Emulex LP9000 FibreChannel host adapter. No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to see the attached tape library!

After tweaking settings for a few hours, I decided to upgrade the firmware on the card to see if that would help. Everything suddenly started working perfectly, and the library detected as a SCSI device with two LUNs!

Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: IBM      Model: ULT3580-TD3      Rev: 57F7
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 01
  Vendor: IBM      Model: ULT3583-TL       Rev: 6.03
  Type:   Medium Changer                   ANSI SCSI revision: 02

Each drive has its own FibreChannel connection, so to use both drives you need to connect each one to an HBA port. The Library's configuration has an option where you can actually assign the medium changer to either drive, so it shows up as an extra LUN on that particular drive.

"Kitsune" is a pathetic Pentium III 550MHz with 256MB of RAM, so it is way too slow a machine to really test the drive's throughput (60MBytes/sec peak, supposedly); that's going to have to wait until we receive a set of SFP transceivers from IBM so it can be hooked up to the Bladecenter. After that, the next step will be to set up one or two of the blades as backup server(s), and set up a new Amanda configuration for the library.

Fibrechannel is pretty spiffy! It's just like SCSI, only the cables are a heck of a lot more manageable and it's a heck of a lot more expensive. You can also set up SANs, or "Storage Area Networks", in which you can assign individual devices to individual servers using software, and make changes without having to physically reconnect anything. Neat stuff; I just wish it were cheaper!