Sharing tapes and disks over the same HBA not a best practice

Sharing tapes and disks over the same HBA not a best practice

Is it possible to share tapes and disks on the same HBA in a Fibre Channel Fabric? We will install Emulex LP9002 on W2K servers.

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Yes, it is possible to see and share tapes and disks over the same HBA in a Fibre Channel fabric but it is not best practice to do so. The reason for this is simple. Tape devices tend to send out a lot of SCSI rest commands on rewind and this can wreak havoc on disk data streams. Also, tape traffic, since it is usually one long continuous data stream, will try to hog the bandwidth of the link. If you are trying to do backups while production is running, it will affect performance.

Zoning tape ports to dedicated HBAs used for tape backup is a better method.

Chris

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This was first published in June 2003