MSL5000 and 6000 Series Tape Libraries User Guide

Troubleshooting
174 HP StorageWorks MSL5000 and MSL6000 Series Tape Libraries User Guide
Library Performance
HP-UX host responds slowly, or crashes
after connecting to the library.
■ Check the SCSI IDs of all devices on the host busses to
ensure there are no conflicts.
■ Check that the application software does not require
SCSI IDs to be in a certain order.
■ Contact your authorized service provider.
The library is not efficiently backing up
data.
■ Check the network bandwidth from the target to the
host computer.
■ Check that the library’s drives are on their own SCSI
bus, and not daisy-chained to another tape drive,
hard drive, or other high bandwidth device.
■ Check that the server and file system have the
processing power and memory needed to stream the
tape drive.
■ Ensure that other applications are not taking up
bandwidth from the backup server or target
workstations.
■ Ensure the server has a fast enough file system (i.e.
RAID).
■ Ensure that the drive is clean.
■ Try a new tape. A marginal tape can cause
performance problems due to bad spots on the tape,
requiring retries.
■ Ensure that the application software is using
fixed-length records (or blocks) to maximize
throughput, and has not defaulted to a smaller record
size. (64K should be sufficient.)
■ Ensure that the data is being compressed, however do
not turn on both software and hardware compression.
(In most cases, hardware compression should be
enabled.)
■ Check the size of the files. Backing up several small
files can impact performance.
Table 12: Troubleshooting General Problems (Continued)
Problem Solution