Chapter 2 — Architecture Overview Fibre Channel Connectivity
December 2019 User Guide—Spectra T200, T380, and T680 Libraries
65
Dual-Port Connectivity As an alternative to the configurations that use a
single port for each partition, dual-port configurations use both interface
ports as a single communications path to the same partition. The ports can
be connected to the same or different SANs. The hosts on the network can
use either port to communicate with the robotics. A dual-port
configuration allows a host to have an alternate, redundant, path to reach
the partition. Not all host software can support this type of configuration.
Notes: The two ports cannot be used simultaneously.
This type of configuration cannot be used in combination
with the Controller Failover feature (see Controller Failover
on page 70).
Drive Connectivity
The drives in the library have either a Fibre Channel interface, a SAS
interface, or a SCSI bus interface.
Fibre Channel drives connect directly to the host using a Fibre Channel
arbitrated loop or fabric, as described in Partitions Using Direct-
Attached Fibre Channel Drives on page 66.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives connect directly to a SAS HBA.
SCSI drives use an F-QIP to provide the Fibre Channel connectivity, as
described in Partitions Using QIP-Attached SCSI Drives on page 67.
The F-QIP acts as a bridge to connect SCSI drives in the DBA to a Fibre
Channel fabric or arbitrated loop. The terminator for each SCSI bus in
the DBA is installed on the drive’s external LVD SCSI connector.
Keep in mind that all of the drives on an arbitrated loop or SCSI bus must
share the data transfer capacity (bandwidth) of the interface. Having
multiple devices on the same loop can negatively impact the performance
of all the devices.
Figure 27 Examples of a dual-path and dual-port
configurations.
A
B
SAN
SAN1
A
B
SAN2
Controller
—OR—
Dual-path connection to the same SAN
Dual-port connection to different SANs
Controller
To Next Page
Loading...
