HP LTO3/LTO4 - Drive Support for DCX 8510 BACKBONE SAN Switch

Asset ID:	1-71-2304328.1
Update Date:	2017-09-06
Keywords:

Solution Type Technical Instruction Sure

Solution 2304328.1 : HP LTO3/LTO4 - Drive Support for DCX 8510 BACKBONE SAN Switch

Applies to:

HP LTO3 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
HP LTO4 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
Sun StorageTek L1400 Tape Library - Version All Versions and later
Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone/Director - Version All Versions and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

The customer planned to switch the HP LTO3/LTO4 FC drives in L1400 from Brocade 48000 SAN Director to new BROCADE DCX 8510 BACKBONE SAN switch.
Due to switch upgrade to 8510（16GB）which do not support L-port, customer want to know how to set HP LTO FC port to F-port.
Could you help to give a guide to change FC port configuration of HP LTO drives in L1400 library?
HP LTO3/LTO4 FC drives port type can auto-negotiate to F-port ?

Goal

HP LTO3/LTO4 - Drive Support for DCX 8510 BACKBONE SAN Switch.

Solution

You can not force drives to be a "Fabric" device from the library. It will configure the drives into Auto Negotiate mode as long as you have the drives configured for a Fibre Channel address of "126".

Being that the customer's FC switch only allows "Fabric" devices to connect to, the drives will be forced to log into the switch as a "Fabric" device, which is what is typically recommended for the LTO tape drives.

One "heads up" is that depending on what HP LTO3 drives the customer has, they might not be supported on that new FC switch. The customer's new FC switch is 16Gb and so it will only support down to a 4Gb FC device. There are 2 versions of the HP LTO3 drives. There is a 2Gb version (these run LxxS code) and then there is a 4Gb version (these run MxxS code). So if their HP LTO3 drives are the 2Gb version then they won't work with the customer's new FC switch.

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