[fa.info-vax] Dual path DSA disks.

info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (08/16/85)

From: Thomas J. Linscomb <linscomb@ut-ngp.ARPA>

> From: ken@CIT-Hamlet.ARPA
> Subject:  Duel path DSA devices
> To: info-vax@CIT-Hamlet.ARPA
> 
> 	I've read that you can have two HSC50s serving the same DSA disk
> (for redundancy, only one HSC does the work at any one time). Has anyone
> tried to connect the second port of an HSC50 served disk to the UDA-50
> on one of the cluster vaxes? Presumably you'd need to set the allocation
> class the same and prey (or otherwise coerce) that the HSC50 was used as
> the primary path. I'm interested in this principally for robustness
> since we have been having trouble with our HSC50 (Circuit breaker in the
> back trips occasionally).
> -Ken Adelman
>  Caltech

  By design, dual porting a UDA disk does not work.  But I have sat with
someone at DECUS who had a system stay up after the HSC-50 serving the
system disk went away and it continued to run on the UDA-50.  Some people
are lucky.
  Remember all the smarts they put out in the UDA-50? What happens to all
those buffers and caches when you dual port the UDA?  They screw you around!
  As a note, I have heard that this is on Digital's wish list (reference
March 1983 PAGESWAPPER, p 18).  Also this does not prevent you from using
the UDA as a hot backup for the HSC.
--Thomas aka linscomb@ut-ngp
  The University of Texas Computation Center