EMC Networker 7.6.3 marks tapes full prematurely

Good Day William

Thanks for prompt response, the drives are FC connected. They are no hardware/ ports error reported on server. SAN connection doesn’t show any faults. The IBM technician ran diagnostic tests, and all the tape drives passed.

Thanks,

Kaizer Matlaisane

Hi Kaizer,

Marking tapes full means NetWorker has received some type of error while writing to or verifying the tape volume in the drive.

The steps you have performed so far are good and correct but you do not mention how the drives are connected Fibre or SCSI ?

Look at OS/fabric logs to see if there are any errors on ports/hardware reported which may need attention. Could be possible faulty cable/GBic/switch port or HBA etc.

Also ensure drives are zoned and configured correctly to limit/stop SCSI resets being performed and other servers which may interfere with the NetWorker storage node functions.

You can if available also try the volumes which have been marked as full in other drives, after making them appendable in NetWorker again to rule out issue with the actual tape cartridges.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Bill Mason

Kaiser,

There is a very good document on Powerlink which details various recommendations we make when configuring check devices for errors: -

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ J-O ~ Documentation > NetWorker Family > Technical Notes

The most relevant Technical Note for you is 'Configuring Tape Devices for EMC NetWorker Technical Note' which provides the

best practices for handling devices with NetWorker.

You should check this and see if the settings EMC recommends are in place for the environment you have.

If this is so can you look in daemon.raw/.log file and post any errors which you see a the relevant time?

Regards,

Bill Mason

Kaizer, I noticed that category for your initial post is AlphaStor - is this AS managed library?