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Understanding tape drives

You must use a qualified tape drive that has been tested and found to work properly on a storage system. You can follow tape aliasing and also enable tape reservations to ensure that only one storage system accesses a tape drive at any particular time.

  • What qualified tape drives are
    A qualified tape drive is a tape drive that has been tested and found to work properly on storage systems. You can qualify tape drives for existing ONTAP releases by using the tape configuration file.
  • Format of the tape configuration file
    The tape configuration file format consists of fields such as vendor ID, product ID, and details of compression types for a tape drive. This file also consists of optional fields for enabling the autoload feature of a tape drive and changing the command timeout values of a tape drive.
  • How the storage system qualifies a new tape drive dynamically
    The storage system qualifies a tape drive dynamically by matching its vendor ID and product ID with the information contained in the tape qualification table.
  • What tape devices are
    A tape device is a representation of a tape drive. It is a specific combination of rewind type and compression capability of a tape drive.
  • What tape aliasing is
    Aliasing simplifies the process of device identification. Aliasing binds a physical path name (PPN) or a serial number (SN) of a tape or a medium changer to a persistent, but modifiable alias name.
  • Considerations when configuring multipath tape access
    You can configure two paths from the storage system to access the tape drives in a tape library. If one path fails, the storage system can use the other paths to access the tape drives without having to immediately repair the failed path. This ensures that tape operations can be restarted.
  • How you add tape drives and libraries to storage systems
    You can add tape drives and libraries to storage system dynamically (without taking the storage system offline).
  • What tape reservations are
    Multiple storage systems can share access to tape drives, medium changers, bridges, or tape libraries. Tape reservations ensure that only one storage system accesses a device at any particular time by enabling either the SCSI Reserve/Release mechanism or SCSI Persistent Reservations for all tape drives, medium changers, bridges, and tape libraries.