Hi.

We're looking at putting in a RedHat server to control a tape library, and it would be great if anybody who has experience would help out with some information.

Our situation is that we have an old and unsupported HP-UX server running an out-of-date OS, that is SCSI attached to a StorageTek L700E tape library, and just controls its robotic arm to load/unload tapes for HP Data Protector backups. It used to do other thngs too, but they've all been migrated off, just leaving that one function.

The rp5450 HP server is quite big and clunky for what is really just a tape library controller appliance, and we would like to replace it with something smaller - a 1U rack mounted unit (it has to be a standalone machine, not a blade).

We are considering a DL360 running RedHat Linux 5.4 (or maybe later) 32-bit (the compatibility spreadsheet has a tick in 32-bit and not in 64-bit), but I haven't implemented one of them into this role. it will attach to the library via SCSI (I think it's 160 SE SCSI).

Has anybody done this, and how did it go?

Also, do you have any idea what the name of the UNIX device for the robotic arm controller will be (on HP-UX it's /dev/rac/c0t8d0)?

Thanks very much for you help!

Haven't done exactly this but we also had HP-UX (11.11) doing robotic control of an L700. We use NetBackup rather than HP Data Protector.

In our setup we were using fibre to SCSI muxes for the drives and the robotic control. We had 2 drives on each mux and the robotic control on one of those as well. HP-UX would see all the devices including the robotic control fine but Linux (RHEL5) wouldn't as it couldn't distinguish between the bus 0 and bus 1 devices on the muxes so thought they were all the same. If you're doing something similar to this you're going to have issues. If you're doing straight SCSI connection to the robotic controller you probably can make it work but as noted above we haven't tried that.

We retired our L700 recently in favor of a Quantum i6000 which has fibre connections to the library built into it. The speed of LT05 drives is phenomenal. We haven't yet done the Linux setup for that.

Thanks.
The latest is that the client is considering just sticking with the old HP-UX 11.0 server, on the basis that it doesn't cost anything.
(Fingers crossed!)

HP-UX 11.0 is fairly ancient. (Heck so is 11.11 but at least its newer than 11.0.)

Not only is the OS out of date and out of support - the hardware is as well. It is PA-RISC based and HP quit selling any PA-RISC stuff at the end of 2009 (now it's all Itanium for HP-UX).

Now that we have the new robot (Quantum i6000 which has Fibre connectivity to the drives built in) we're planning on migrating to a Linux backup master. You should probably tell the client they really need to bite the bullet and upgrade. They may not heed you today but if you tell them that every time they have issues eventually they'll actually believe it.

Thanks.
There is a project in a stop/start/stop/start state to replace the whole solution.
I think it's based on NetBackup, with the de-duplication features for Windows, and also VMware features.
There may be VTLs and/or other replication involved too.