Specifications

Chapter 2. Tapes (SCSI and awstape) 19
2.2.1 Specific hardware tested
IBM testing involved the following SCSI drives:
򐂰 IBM 3592-E05 TS1120 fibre channel attached SCSI tape drive. The drive was at firmware
level 1C91, as determined by the itdtinst1.2LinuxX86 and itdtinst4.1.0.026LinuxX86_64
tools from IBM.
򐂰 Fujitsu M2488E parallel SCSI tape drives, whose media cartridge is compatible with IBM
3480 and 3490 drives. These drives were at firmware level 7.C.01 or 7.xG.01 as
determined through the drives control panel.
򐂰 IBM LTO-3 3580 parallel SCSI tape drive. This was at firmware level 5BG4 as determined
by the itdtinst1.2LinuxX86 from IBM.
These drives were tested with IBM System X servers x3650-M1 (7979), x3650-M2 (7947),
and x3500-M2 (7939). The following adapters were used:
򐂰 Emulex Corporation Zephyr-X LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Adapter (rev 02). This was
at Emulex LightPulse x86 BIOS Version 1.71A0, firmware ZS2.50A, as displayed during
the BIOS startup.
The Linux device drivers (provided in the Linux distribution) were determined by using the
command dmesg | grep Emulex:
– RHEL 5.3 (64-bits): Emulex LightPluse Fibre Channel SCSI driver 8.2.0.33.3p.
– openSUSE 11.1 (64-bits): Emulex LightPluse Fibre Channel SCSI driver 8.2.8.7.
– SLES 11 (64-bits): Emulex LightPluse Fibre Channel SCSI driver 8.2.8.14.
򐂰 Q Logic Corporation ISP2432-based 4Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 03).
This was at BIOS revision 1.28, as displayed during BIOS startup. The firmware level was
4.04.05 [IP][Multi-ID][84XX] as determined by the ql-hba-snapshot.sh tool from Qlogic.
The Linux device drivers (provided in the Linux distribution) were determined by using the
command dmesg | grep Qlogic:
– RHEL 5.3 (64-bits): Qlogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver 8.02.00.06.05.03-k.
– openSUSE 11.1 (64.bits): Qlogic Fibre Channel HBA Driver 8.02.01.02.11.0-k9.
򐂰 Adaptec ASC-29320ALP U320 (rev 10) parallel SCSI adapter, at Adaptec SCSI Card
29320LPE Flash BIOS v4.31.2S1 as displayed during BIOS startup.
Block size
You probably want to use variable block sizes with SCSI tape drives. You can check for this
with these commands:
$ su (switch to root; may not be necessary)
# mt -f/dev/st0 status
If the indicated tape block size is 0 bytes, then the drive is set for variable block sizes. If not,
enter the following command:
# mt -f/dev/st0 setblk 0
Notice that we use the /dev/stN devices rather than the /dev/sgN devices for these
commands.
The Linux drivers for Emulex and Qlogic both defaulted to a maximum block size of 32K.
Block sizes larger than 32 K are typically not used by application programs; however, large
block sizes may be used by backup programs (such as ADRDSSU for z/OS) or by virtual tape
managers.