SUMMARY: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN

From: S. Cowles (scowles@incyte.com)
Date: Thu Apr 22 1999 - 15:38:49 CDT


Original question:

>Does anyone have experience with the StorageTek 9840's and/or Veritas'
>Storage Area Network on Sun Solaris platforms? I'm interested in
>finding out experiences pro and con with architectures/machine
>configurations, fiber switches, observered throughput, etc.

SUMMARY:

Replies to my request were minimal. The few that have come in with
data indicate that things appear to work as expected. This is
still, however, the bleeding edge of backup and archiving
technology.

The Storage Tek 9840 drives are out and one respondent relayed that
his only problem so far was cable length sensitivity.

The anecdotal pieces that I've pulled together add the following:

SAN's depend on some kind of fiber switch to provide intelligent
connections between disks and jukebox/tapedrives. Examples of these
are mentioned on the SAN web page at Veritas
(http://www.veritas.com/san/index.htm). Storage Tek offers a page
on open SAN standards and participating vendors
(http://www.stortek.com/StorageTek/news/nr990405.html). Much of
this is still new and part of emerging standards. EMC offers
another take on the topic (http://www.emc.com) and purports to have
a solution that can be used with Solaris. It relies upon their
Connectrix product, among others.

Thanks to the respondants. Replies are included, below.

From: "Keating, Peter" <PKeating@mits.com.au>
From: "Luke A. Kanies" <luke@metro1.com>
From: Jenson Luk <jluk@mdsi.bc.ca>
From: Leonard Simon <simonl@tvratings.com>
From: Sherman Schorzman <sschorz@jcrew.com>

Cheers,

Sid

S. Cowles, PhD
Senior Scientist, Production Informatics
Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
3174 Porter Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA
+1-650-845-4152(voice)
+1-650-845-4850(fax-direct)
+1-510-290-1165(cell, voice)
+1-510-290-1165(cell, pager, option 2)
5102901165@messaging.sprintpcs.com(cell, via email)
scowles@incyte.com
scowles@earthlink.net
http://pigs.incyte.com (incyte intranet)

===================================================================================

>From POPmail Thu Mar 18 18:17:41 1999
Return-Path: <sschorz@jcrew.com>
From: "Sherman Schorzman" <sschorz@jcrew.com>
To: <scowles@incyte.com>
Subject: RE: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 15:07:13 -0500
Message-ID: <000601be717a$e9c6a0d0$4b64020a@sschorz.jcrew.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9903181131040.21449-100000@apollo.incyte.com>

Yes I am using NetBackup and the realated products from Veritas.
No I have not found a good resourse. I have tried to hire a person
with good Vetitas experience but have failed. I then tried to
encourage one of my staff to become an expert on the Veritas line of
products. That didn't work either. So I start the Netbackup classes
next week. It seems strange that for a product that has such a good
reputation and is so popular, there are so few people that at good
with it. Maybe we should start a Veritas SAN email list similar to
the sunmanagers list.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: S. Cowles [mailto:scowles@incyte.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 1999 2:36 PM
> To: Sherman Schorzman
> Cc: Richard Linton
> Subject: RE: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
>
> Thanks, Sherman! Are you running NetBackup, HSM, GSM, HA, etc?
> It sounds like,
> with pairs of E3K's and E5.5K's that it might be H/A; is this the
> case? Did you
> run into any good technical advisors either from StorageTek or
> Veritas? I just
> finished NetBackup and HSM classes at Veritas, and the instructor, Mark
> Erickson, seemed to be quite familiar with varied configurations
> and pros and
> cons of various HSM configs.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sid
>
>
> On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Sherman Schorzman wrote:
>
> orig: Return-Path: <sschorz@jcrew.com>
> orig: From: "Sherman Schorzman" <sschorz@jcrew.com>
> orig: To: <scowles@incyte.com>
> orig: Subject: RE: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
> orig: Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 08:42:46 -0500
> orig: Message-ID: <000001be7145$34af0500$4b64020a@sschorz.jcrew.com>
> orig:
> orig: Hello,
> orig:
> orig: My name is Sherman Schorzman. I am running Veritas on a
> pair of enterprise
> orig: 3000's and 2 pairs of 5500's. I use fiber channel and
> Suns A5000's for
> orig: disks. I really like the setup. I am not using fiber
> switches at this time
> orig: but plan to change in the summer.
> orig:
> orig: Sherman Schorzman
> orig: Director - Systems Engineering
> orig: J.Crew
> orig:
> orig: > -----Original Message-----
> orig: > From: owner-sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu
> orig: > [mailto:owner-sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu]On
> Behalf Of S.
> orig: > Cowles
> orig: > Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 1999 9:31 PM
> orig: > To: Sun Managers
> orig: > Subject: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
> orig: >
> orig: >
> orig: >
> orig: > Does anyone have experience with the StorageTek 9840's and/or
> orig: > Veritas' Storage
> orig: > Area Network on Sun Solaris platforms? I'm interested
> in finding out
> orig: > experiences pro and con with architectures/machine
> configurations, fiber
> orig: > switches, observered throughput, etc.
> orig: >
> orig: > Thanks,
> orig: >
> orig: > Sid
> orig: >
> orig: > S. Cowles, PhD
>
> S. Cowles, PhD

>From POPmail Fri Mar 19 15:00:44 1999
Return-Path: <jluk@mdsi.bc.ca>
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990318213605.0118a490@mail>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 21:36:05 -0800
To: scowles@incyte.com
From: Jenson Luk <jluk@mdsi.bc.ca>
Subject: Appreciate if you can copy me on the answers
  received...tia...Re: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
Cc: jluk@mdsi.bc.ca
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9903171826500.21449-100000@apollo.incyte.com
>
References: <36E54F44.683FFB9@warp.dats.ml.com>

hi,

I am looking for similar solution. In case you have the answer and time,
please let me have a copy of the answers.

At 06:30 PM 3/17/99 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Does anyone have experience with the StorageTek 9840's and/or Veritas'
Storage
>Area Network on Sun Solaris platforms? I'm interested in finding out
>experiences pro and con with architectures/machine configurations, fiber
>switches, observered throughput, etc.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Sid
>
>S. Cowles, PhD
>
Thanks

Jenson Luk
Sytems Administrator
Direct line : 604 - 207-6247
General line: 604 - 207-6000
Fax: 604 - 207-6060

>From POPmail Thu Mar 18 11:25:37 1999
Return-Path: <sun-managers-relay@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:30:35 -0800 (PST)
From: "S. Cowles" <scowles@incyte.com>
Reply-To: scowles@incyte.com
To: Sun Managers <sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu>
Subject: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
In-Reply-To: <36E54F44.683FFB9@warp.dats.ml.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9903171826500.21449-100000@apollo.incyte.com>

Does anyone have experience with the StorageTek 9840's and/or Veritas' Storage
Area Network on Sun Solaris platforms? I'm interested in finding out
experiences pro and con with architectures/machine configurations, fiber
switches, observered throughput, etc.

Thanks,

Sid

S. Cowles, PhD

>From POPmail Thu Mar 18 18:17:49 1999
Return-Path: <sun-managers-relay@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu>
Message-ID: <815B9F3E2850D111AAA90000F878EB25DB2137@MITS_COM1>
From: "Keating, Peter" <PKeating@mits.com.au>
To: "'sun-managers'" <sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu>
Subject: NetBackup mount requests
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:39:54 +1000

I have a customer using NetBackup 3.1.1GA with the Master server on an
E3000 (2.6) and a slave on an E3000 (2.5.1).

The slave server has a Sun DLT7000 drive and is used to back up itself
as its only client, the Oracle extension package is installed
(SUNWnbora).

Each night a backup of all oracle DBs is attempted using a single class
with an ebu script for each of the databases on this machine. When it
works this creates around 130 backup files on the tape totaling ~40GB.

My problem is that sometimes a second tape is requested during the
backup, the tape in the drive does not generate any errors, is not
flagged as full, has no messages reported by netbackup as to why it is
no longer acceptable, and is not ejected (NO_STANDALONE_UNLOAD has been
specified). If the individual backup if killed, the next dbf file is
happy to continue with the original tape. With no operators around
overnight we can't change tapes.

Logging of bptm, bpbrm, and bpsched has been turned on, and copies of
logs from several occurrences have been sent to OpenVision/Veritas but
as yet no solution has been found.

Can anyone help?

Regards,
Peter

>From POPmail Tue Apr 6 12:32:02 1999
Return-Path: <simonl@tvratings.com>
Sender: simonl@nielsenmedia.com
Message-ID: <370A5804.A88FAAFC@tvratings.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 14:52:52 -0400
From: Leonard Simon <simonl@tvratings.com>
To: scowles@incyte.com
Subject: STK

We just received our 9840 tape drives and are testing them out.
One thing we found is that the cable length on an ultra wide scsi
differential is important.
We had first tested with a 20 meter cable and got parity errors.
We went back to a 12 meter cable and no problems.

As far as speeds go we don't have any numbers yet.

When you find out about SAN products I would be interested in this.

Leonard Simon

>From POPmail Wed Apr 7 19:04:12 1999
Return-Path: <luke@metro1.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 16:06:37 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Luke A. Kanies" <luke@metro1.com>
To: "S. Cowles" <scowles@incyte.com>
Subject: Re: experience with StorageTek 9840 and/or Veritas SAN
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9903171826500.21449-100000@apollo.incyte.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.05.9904071604410.11073-100000@grendel>

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, S. Cowles wrote:

>
> Does anyone have experience with the StorageTek 9840's and/or Veritas' Storage
> Area Network on Sun Solaris platforms? I'm interested in finding out
> experiences pro and con with architectures/machine configurations, fiber
> switches, observered throughput, etc.

I've been working a lot with Veritas recently, and as far as I know, they
don't have a SAN available for Solaris right now (actually, as far as I
know, no one does). The best you can get with pure Sun equipment is a
bunch of 5x00 series arrays in a cabinet attached to multiple (i.e, four
or less) machines, but you can get proportional performance degradation
with additional machines.

Sorry for the late reply, hope it was still useful.

           I'd explain it to you, but your | (503) 643-9500 corp
                brain would explode. | (503) 793-0656 cell
  ------------------------------------------------- (503) 604-two1 pager
                     Luke A. Kanies



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