km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) (11/11/84)
We are about to add our third Vax. One runs VMS and the other
two will run 4.2BSD. Until now (with just two Vaxen) we handled
tape drives by just dual porting them. With 3 Vaxen the issue
is more complicated. Adding another good tape drive is expensive,
and dual porting will not handle peek needs and breakdowns
in any optimal way.
What comes to mind is some scheme for putting all the drives
on an ethernet. However, to be useful to us this must work
for both Unix and VMS. Also one vax should not expend any
resources on the others to access the drives (or for that matter
require any of the other Vaxen to be up).
I guess what I am fishing for is a tape server that talks
to all the tape drives (a variety of fancy DEC drives),
and uses the ethernet to talk to the Vaxen, together with
hardware/software on the Vaxen that make it look like the
drives are local.
Any suggestions?
(We run EUNICE on the VMS VAX, but a solution that exploits
this is not likely to be sufficiently dependable. A Unix
only solution would be better than nothing.)
--
Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322
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