Tape Drive Upgrade

Question

I'm running a SunFire v440 with a IBM 3584 tape library. Solaris 9 is the OS and Veritas NetBackup 5.1 is the App. Currently the IBM 3584 has LTO-2 drives in it and the backup team wants to upgrade to LTO-3 drives. They are planning on using the same WWN's thinking this will make the transition easier. I've never worked with tape drives before and need to know if this is valid.
Also, to get the drives visable to Netbackup does anything have to be done at the OS level? I've reviewed the sg.conf file and don't see anything that stands out but my knowledge of this is limited.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,
After changing the drives (if they are fiber native) the WWN�s will change since each fiber device has a unique WWN like a MAC. (remember zoning on the fiber switch also needs to be done to accommodate the new hardware.)
It is best to 1st unconfigure the old devices:
cfgadm �al will display the information you require to see where the drives bind to c(#)
run cfgadm �c unconfigure c(#) to remove the old tape drives from the configuration.
Now run the clean-up devfsadm �C
Replace the drives with the LTO-3 units and zone the switch accordingly unless you use a switch that makes use of VSAN.
Reboot tape library
Run the configuration cfgadm �c configure c(#) you might need to do a force update in some cases: cfgadm �c configure �o force_update c(#)
List the devices cfgadm �al
If all is well up to this point you are set from the OS side.
You will need to reconfigure the storage devices in Netbackup since the serial numbers of the drives are now different.
Make sure you follow the guidelines for adding the correct values for LTO3 to the two files listed below to make sure your drives perform at their peak.
/usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS
/usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/SIZE_DATA_BUFFERS
Hope this helps.