Neil,

Hubs will create a problem for you in this application. I imagine you'd configure the unmanaged hub with two or more filers and the library all attached to a port on the hub. When things init, the filers will become aware of each other because they will be present in the map of devices on the Fibre Channel loop. They will then proceed to attempt to login with each other. As their both initiators, this won't go well.

The other problem will be that resets propagate. Action by one filer could easily reset your tape drive causing the backup or restore to abort.

It was for exactly these reasons we went with the managed hub solution. By partitioning or zoning properly each filer sees only the tape drives and propagation of resets or loop initializations is filtered.

You might be interested in checking NOW for information on our real fabric implementation. It has some very nice features. You can connect many filers into a Brocade switch and share multiple tape drives. We've also added a feature called tape aliasing. Tape aliasing works in conjunction with these shared resource to insure that there's a consistent mapping of tape devices to logical tape names. It insures that from filer to filer if you want to use rst0a it will always be a tape drive at either a certain switch,port,id location or will always find a device with a particular world-wide name regardless of where its attached. You can choose.

Check it out on NOW at: http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/olio/SAN_GOLD/FC2/index.shtml

Tony ------------------------------------------- Tony Aiello, Mgr. Storage SW mailto:taiello@netapp.com Ph:(408)822-6515

-----Original Message----- From: neil lehrer [mailto:nlehrer@ibb.gov] Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 12:46 PM To: toasters Subject: fibre channel hubs

has netapp qualified any of the vixel hubs for tape backup? the hubs are much cheaper than the vixel 8100 and i don't think the lesser performance will be an issue in my case - two filers.

thanks