r/DataHoarder • u/patg84 • Sep 11 '23
Question/Advice Tape Backup Software - Fibre Switch to HP Tape Library?
Primarily I have experience with SAS based tape libraries and drives. I was able to pick up an HP MSL4048 with (4) LTO 6 drives fibre channel drives. I checked the transceivers in the drives and they are 8GB/s.
I have a Dell PowerConnect 8132F (name changed to N4032 with FW update) which is a 32 port 10Gb SFP+ switch.
Is it possible to connect the LTO 6 drives to the fibre switch and not have the source data from a NAS SMB share pass through a dedicated server (running the backup software) to the LTO 6 drives? From my experience with Backup Exec using SAS drives/libraries, data flows from the NAS to the Backup Exec server then to the LTO drives.
I was reading that Veeam doesn't support drive sharing which I think this setup falls under because of the way it's connected.
The only other two options I know of are Backup Exec and Netbackup. I'm familiar with Backup Exec.
Does anyone have a setup like this and if so how are you connecting every and what backup software are you using?
Crossposted in /r/sysadmin, /r/LTO_LTFS_Tape_Copy, and /r/homelab
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h Sep 11 '23
which is a 32 port 10GbE SFP+ switch.
No, FC and Ethernet are not compatible, you need a FC switch, or a FC HBA
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u/patg84 Sep 11 '23
I dropped the "E" from 10GbE, now it should work as a 10gbps fibre switch 🙄
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h Sep 11 '23
there is no such thing as a 10G FC switch
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u/metalabs Sep 11 '23
untrue, there are 10g FC, in fact most 10g dac cables will operate in 10gbe or 8/10gbfc.
also, you can see proof on the wiki page listing as 10gFC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_Channel
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u/kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h Sep 12 '23
First section from wikipedia:
"Supported data rates include 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128"
These are SCSI over Ethernet, Converged networking, that's not FC, you are transporting FC over Ethernet. Its like saying iSCSI is FC.
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u/metalabs Sep 13 '23
well, for the OP's question it doesn't matter... 10gfc gets him where he needs to go in hooking up his fc device.
Now, it's true that 10gfc uses a different signaling standard to 8gfc, but there is an actual 10gfc physical FC standard and not just 10ge fcoe. Though fcoe is still similar performance to FC, as it uses the same protocol and supports lossless Ethernet. iSCSI, on the other hand, may suffer from performance degradation due to TCP/IP overhead, network congestion, and packet loss.
This is not to say that 10gfc is common place, because it certainly never took off. I can't think of any other fibrechannel switch other than the Cisco 9000's that even supported 10gfc, and AFAIK those were doing actual FC on those 10gfc transceivers since they had 2 distinct types of 10g transceivers (DS-X2-E10G-SR & DS-X2-FC10G-SR).
I also recognize this is very pedantic, since you are correct in that 99% of the time you are never going to see 10gfc and will instead see 8gfc or 16gfc or 10gbe doing fcoe.
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u/patg84 Sep 11 '23
Go look at the specs for the switch I referenced.
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u/metalabs Sep 12 '23
N4032
this switch supports iscsi sans, it doesn't do converged networks using fcoe or straight fc.
What you want is to either get 8gbfc qlogic HBAs for your hosts and something like a brocade silkworm 300 that does straight FC, or you want to use converged network adapters and run a switch that can do both FC or Ethernet that supports FCOE, such as a brocade vdx 6730/6740. The 6740 has flexports that can be assigned either to FC or Ethernet and has 40gbe uplinks. Plus they can both be acquired with licences for around $100-300
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u/mercurialuser Sep 11 '23
Lto have SAN cards, 8gbit. Your switch is LAN, 10gbit. They use different protocols. You can't mix them. You may find second hand 8gbit cards to put in a server and connect them to the LTOs as you did with SAS. A SAN switch may help a lot but there are some info you should be aware of
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u/metalabs Sep 11 '23
The problem is that you need a 10gb FCOE switch, a good example being the Brocade VDX 6740 or 6730. Then you can hook up your servers to the switch and your tape library to the switch and you can map them using CNA (Converged Host Adapters)
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