Issue with running multiple tape drives

[rmunizus]

Hello,

 

Hope someone can tell me what to do with this thing besides drop kick it out the door.

 

First, some background. We're running Retospect 7.0 on a Breecehill Istora 4000 Tape Library System with Windows 2003 Server as the OS. Things worked fine. We then got the bright idea that since the SAIT tapes are rather expensive, and we had about a hundred DLT tapes we could use, that we should figure out a way to inegrate our Benchmark VS640 DLT Library into the mix. This involved going out, and purchasing a PCIx card, isntalling it, and hooking the Library up to it. Everything still fine, until. . .

 

This Weekend.

 

I dialed in to check my disk to tape transfer jobs, and was appaled to see that the Thursday Disk to tape was still running (these run on the DLT). The transfer rate was way down (like .x mb per minute). While I was troubleshooting that, I decided to get the Friday disk2tape going (which goes onto the SAIT tapes). It didn't fire into the executing mode, but I saw it in the waiting screen stating it was waiting for the SAIT tape drive which wasn't busy. The only thing running was the DLT drive.

 

I then discovered something rather bizzare. If I stopped the job on the DLT drive, the SAIT drive would run, but the DLT drive job would go into waiting.

 

I checked the Device Manager and noted that both drives were apparently disabled. I could enable one or the other, but not both. I then checked resources in properties, and note the following for the two drives:

 

For the SAIT drive, the BUS number is 0, Target ID 0, LUN 0.

For the DLT drive the bus number is 0, Target ID 5, LUN 0.

 

The aprt that is totally bedeviling me is that it acts like a hardware conflict, but the tape drives are on two diffrent SCSI cards that are supposed to be running on two diffrent channels.

 

Any ideas? Appreciate it.

 

Rich

[natew]

Hi

 

You need to buy the Advanced Tape Support add on to use two tape drives simultaneously. Otherwise you will have to use them one at a time.

 

Thanks

Nate