We are currently trying to implement a SAN backup solution involving several F840 (ONTAP 6.2R2, latest FW) and R100 (ONTAP 6.2.1, latest FW) filers, a Brocade Silkwork 3800 switch (kernel 5.3.1, fabric OS 3.0), a Crossroads 10000, an ATL P7000 tape drive library with 8 SDLT drives, and Commvault Galaxy software (4.1.0, Build 26). We have tried firmware versions 4.03.16, 4.03.17, and 4.19 on the Crossroads 10000.
The problem we are experiencing is that the devices on our filers which represent the SAN attached tape drives (shown by sysconfig -t) get randomly recreated every time the Crossroads reboots. Since we can't guarantee which devices will get assigned to which tape drive LUN, they often do not match those configured in the Commvault Galaxy backup software. The resulting mismatch causes many backup problems. It appears as though the Crossroads is not presenting the tape drives available on the ATL P7000 in the same order every time it reboots.
We have read through the information available at http://www.netapp.com/osn/info/config.html#fcsan. This site shows support for the Brocade 3800. Although they do not call out support for the Crossroads 10000 specifically, they do show a wide range of options using various SCSI-FIBER bridges with a variety of libraries. The StorageTek library they show uses a Crossroads 42xx series switch.
Has anyone else run into this situation? Is there any way of compensating for this on the Netapp filers? I realize that it would be better if the Crossroads would present the tape drive LUNs in the same order every time, but that doesn't appear to be configurable. It would help if we could permanently assign the devices to the tape drive LUNs on the filers.
BTW, we have received suggestions regarding using the Netapp "storage alias" and "storage unalias" commands. However, since the Galaxy backup software relies on the actual device names (i.e. rst0l, nrst0l, urst0l, etc.) this hasn't helped us so far.