gotwols@warper.jhuapl.edu (Bruce Gotwols) (06/20/91)
There has been much discussion in this news group about whether an Exabyte 8 mm tape drive will run on the new HP 9000/720 workstation. Since I have some experience in this area I thought I'd post some preliminary comments. AN HP720 arrived yesterday and was promptly set up. We connected an Exabyte 8200 tape drive to it today at SCSI address 1. We also purchased an HP DAT tape for it and put it at SCSI address 0. We used mknod to set up several variants of the driver for both devices and located them in /dev/rmt/. The DAT works fine but the Exabyte does not. The Exabyte is clearly talking to the workstation as it's light blinks when we try to open it for access, but the tape cannot be opened either for reading or writing. The symtoms are the same whether we use the dd utility or a C program of our own making. We have been successful in making an Exabyte work on an HP 9000/360 (Motorola based) workstation. In that case we were running HP-UX v7.something in contrast to the new workstation which runs HP-UX v8.01 . I am reasonably certain we were doing everything right on the new workstation as we tried many combinations of minor device numbers in addition to the ones we used on the older workstation. Also we jumped back and forth between the two workstations in a matter of minutes. My preliminary conclusion is that HP has changed the rmt driver so that it will only work with their own DAT tape drive. This possibility was mentioned recently on this news group by a reader who had seen the driver source code. If this is really true, and if this shortsighted policy is not promptly reversed this will be the first and last workstation I purchase from HP. I was drawn to the HP workstaion primarily because of its speed but also I had read how open UNIX was. My previous experience was with DEC VMS, a not particularly open architecture. However DEC does support third party SCSI tape drives, as does SUN (I have tested and used both extensively). I suspect that HP does not want to undercut the success of their admittedly nice DAT drives by supporting Exabyte. However for many users in experimental science the DAT just isn't large enough and never will be even after the compression option becomes available. The workstation that arrived yesterday has 2 GBytes of storage, but the DAT only holds 1.2 GB, so I already have to use two tapes to back it up. I am expecting tapes from a field site soon with 5 GB of data on each (Exabyte 8500). In the coming year these will at least double in capacity when we start to use compression. I don't need my friendly workstation supplier running interference on me and preventing me from using the mass storage media of choice. Aside fromn the above grief, how do I like the 720? It's wonderful! Very fast and generally well done. The relatively minor annoyances of a poor keyboard layout and not so hot color monitor are more than made up for by the blazing speed improvement over our VAX 3100 (VMS) workstations, of which we have many. If I'm right and this is a corporate policy we users should complain loud and clear. In my case I simply can't live with this constraint. -- -- Bruce L. Gotwols Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Lab., Laurel MD 20723 Internet: gotwols@warper.jhuapl.edu (128.244.176.48)
kinsell@hpfcdj.HP.COM (Dave Kinsell) (06/26/91)
Bruce L. Gotwols writes: >We have been successful in making an Exabyte work on an HP 9000/360 (Motorola >based) workstation. In that case we were running HP-UX v7.something in >contrast to the new workstation which runs HP-UX v8.01 . I am reasonably >certain we were doing everything right on the new workstation as we tried >many combinations of minor device numbers in addition to the ones we used on >the older workstation. Also we jumped back and forth between the two >workstations in a matter of minutes. >My preliminary conclusion is that HP has changed the rmt driver so that it >will only work with their own DAT tape drive. This possibility was mentioned >recently on this news group by a reader who had seen the driver source code. I think you're jumping to some hasty conclusions here. There isn't one rmt driver, there's really three quite distinct drivers for the 400s, 700s, and 800s. The comments you saw were very specifically about the 8.0 release for S800 machines. 8.0 for S300/400 still provides the basic read/write functionality on the Exabytes. Functionality on S700 machines wasn't disabled, it simply never has worked, and it was never was an objective to make it work. Exabyte started shipping well before SCSI-2 was ever defined, and it's really not surprising that a driver taking advantage of SCSI-2 features may not be compatible with it. That's not due to any deep dark conspiracy, it's just a fact of life. The philosophy for outside peripheral support has been to allow third-parties to provide it, and let them assume the support work. Let me assure you, supporting peripherals actually does entail real, honest work, both in the original implementation and in continuing maintenance. There are two vendors providing Exabyte solutions for S300/400, and it would be reasonable to expect similar arrangements to develop for S700 machines in the future. Regards Dave Kinsell kinsell@hpfcmb.hp.com