StorageTek T10000C Tape Drive
 

PLA-Support>Sun Systems>TAPE>Tape Hardware>SN-TP: STK T-Series Drive
 

In this Document

Goal

Fix

Applies to:

Goal

Configuration Changes With 1.57.307 Microcode.

There will be changes to the Tape Application Accelerator feature where TAA now gets two more selectable modes for both Fiber Channel and FICON emulation in 1.57.307 microcode.

Fix

StorageTek Tape Application Accelerator

The terms File Synch and Tape Marks are handled slightly different for FICON and Fibre Channel.

The StorageTek Tape Application Accelerator (TAA) is an innovative feature exclusively available in the StorageTek T10000C tape drive. It offers another means of increasing write throughput to tape despite an application’s propensity for inserting sync commands into the data stream.

This feature works similarly to StorageTek FSA by enabling the tape drive to write data that contains a high frequency of sync commands without stopping the tape.

Unlike StorageTek FSA, TAA does not cause the tape drive to write the data “sparsely” to an intermediate location on tape before writing the data to its final location. Data is instead written directly to its final location without any gaps of progressive write data.

Prior to enabling any of the TAA options, the customer should understand the application’s method as to how the application implements the use of Filemarks and Syncs.

When TAA is enabled in the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, it causes the tape drive to respond to Tape Mark and File Sync commands differently than when TAA is disabled:

• A Tape Mark received by the tape drive is treated as a Buffered Tape Mark.
• A File Sync received by the tape drive is treated as a No Op command.

Since Buffered Tape Marks and No Op commands do not cause the tape drive to empty the contents of its buffer to tape and back hitch, the data is written to tape in significantly less time.

There is a new message that will be displayed by VOP 2.1 when the TAA feature is selected. This will affect all FICON and FIBRE modes:

WARNING
Enabling this feature may expose customer to potential loss of data when running any application that cannot tolerate the use of buffered tape marks.  For Ficon, DDR SWAP may not be invoked to allow recovery from permanent output errors.  Therefore, the duplexing of all output is recommended.

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