Communicator e3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 Express 1 (C.60.01) (30216-90286)

Chapter 3 27
Technical Articles
Announcing DLT4000/DLT7000 Differential Tape Support on MPE/IX
Announcing DLT4000/DLT7000 Differential Tape Support
on MPE/IX
by Larry Nichoalds, CSY Labs
Jim Hawkins, SSD WTEC
Beginning with Release 5.5 Express 7, MPE/iX supports the following stand-alone
Differential DLT Tape drives:
• DLT4000 (C3690A) - F/W SCSI interface (not a true F/W device see “Product Overview”)
• DLT7000 (C6374A) - F/W SCSI interface
Software Requirements
Customers wishing to use these new DLT devices must be running on MPE/iX 5.5 or
LATER version of MPE/iX. On MPE/iX 5.5 (Release C.55.00, MPE/iX 31900C.05.08) a
patch provides the critical software device driver enhancements necessary for the support
of these DLTs. Again, these devices are NOT supported on MPE/iX 5.0 (Release C.50.00,
31900B.79.06) and there are no plans to support these devices on 5.0 in the future.
Upon the release of Release 6.0 Express 1, there will not immediately be any patches for
Predictive Support or Online Diagnostics that specifically support the new device IDs. In
the short term Predictive and Diagnostic tools will likely flag these devices as “unknown”
or “unsupported.” However, the SCSIDLT diagnostic will function for these devices AND
plans are in place to include Predictive and Diagnostics in the next open
Express/PowerPatch Release for 5.5.
Hardware Requirements
On HP3000 S900 systems F/W SCSI Device Support is typically provided via the 28696A
NIO F/W SCSI Device Adapter Card. At the time this article was written, there are two
other possible F/W SCSI Device Adapter Cards.
NEITHER of these connection options is actually supported:
Unsupported
connection
Option #1
The 9x9KS “Core I/O Card” A3453-69210 exports a F/W SCSI
interface. However we do NOT, for performance reasons, support or
recommend that a DLT be connected via this interface. The
assumption is that this exported bus will also be shared with the
system’s internal disks and unpredictable and unacceptable
performance may be seen when disks and DLT are accessed
simultaneously (as during STORE/RESTORE). (Please read
additional information in the Product Overview section for details on
device performance.
Unsupported
connection
Option #2
The HP-HSC F/W DA A2969A is not supported on HP3000 S900 systems.
This card requires the existence of “Device Adapter Software” that has yet to
be written for MPE/iX.