HPE StoreOpen Software - LTFS for Tape Libraries (Version 3.4) Video

Transcript.

Hello in this video I'm going to give a brief overview of the latest version of Hewlett Packard enterprises store open software and demonstrate some of the great new features which continue to make tape easy to use. StoreOpen builds on the foundations of LTFS the Linear Tape file system to allow simple familiar access to an LTO tape cartridge in a way that is similar to a hard drive or USB memory stick or thumb drive.

HPE provides this storeOpen software free of charge for use with its store ever LTO tape drive products and version 3.4 is the latest release for all three supported operating system platforms Linux Mac OS and of course for Windows StoreOpen software version 3.4 includes a number of enhancements as well as defect fixes the most exciting change is in the Windows version where we now support tape libraries the previous release version 3.3 added limited support for the 1/8 autoloader product but that has now been extended to across the whole family of MSL tape libraries 2024 4048 6480 and the latest edition the 3040.

This support includes up to 2 tape drives in the library which can be configured in the same library partition or in two separate partitions. To demonstrate this let's take a look at a to drive single partition library in this case it's a 4048. We can see from Windows Explorer that we currently have one tape drive mounted as the S Drive and if we right-click on that and select properties and look at the LTFS details we see that this drive is in fact contained within a changer in MSL G3-series and as the serial number of the library so because this drive is in the library we get an additional right-click menu option which is not there for a standalone Drive when we right click we have the option to change cartridge selecting that provides a list of all the slots within that library

There are a few things to note here the first and most obvious is that this particular library has many empty slots and they're actually only 8 cartridges present the second thing you may note is that one of the line the cartridges has a checkmark next to it and this is the cartridge that is currently loaded in this tape drive, if we want to change cartridge we simply can select the cartridge we want so we select that barcode and the current cartridge will be unmounted return to the storage slot the new desired cartridge will be moved into the tape drive loaded and then mounted so we now just need to wait for the software to do its thing as it reloads the cartridge while it's doing that I could mention that we could also just return the cartridge to its original slot without loading another one by selecting the original checked entry and the software would then just return the cartridge whence it came the process of returning a cartridge to storage and selecting a new cartridge or moving it into the tape drive and remounting it can take several minutes so the dialogue box gives you status as that progresses and it just need to wait for that to complete when it's done the Explorer view will refresh and instead of the previous cartridge we'll see the new one being visible and there we are the process has completed and we now instead of the volume called samples we now have one called test volume and of course we could right click on that guy and under change cartridge you see that the slot we chose to load 163 is now selected we could repeat the process and choose a different cartridge instead what we'll do is to use the configuration utility to mount a second drive we currently have LTO 6 drive mounted as s so if we select the LTO 5 drive in this library we'll get them out that is the T Drive so we select create mapping the drive is empty currently so it's completed very quickly and says there's no cartridge so now we can right-click on the T Drive and select change cartridge as before and choose a cartridge to load as our T volume you'll notice that cartridge 163 has a check mark but it's also grayed out that's because this cartridge is not available to us in this drive it's already mounted in the other Drive in the s volume so we can't select that one but we can select one of the others so let's go with 164 and as before the process will go and collect the cartridge move it into the drive and mount it for us whilst it's loading let's just think about what happens if the library has been partitioned in other words separated into two logical libraries we'd store open software you can mount up to two tape drives at the same time and these can be from the same partition as in this case but it could also be from two different partitions in that case the list of cartridges you see when you right click reflects the cartridges that are present in the corresponding partition so if the two drives come from two different partitions you'll see two different lists of cartridges you cannot exchange cartridges between the partitions and nor does store open deal with any library configuration changes or the import/export of media for example for those kinds of operations you need to use the library front panel or the remote management interface web page there we are the volume is completed we now have S and T drives visible and T it now contains the samples cartridge which we had originally in the S drive at the start of this little video so using the store open software hope you can see that it's fairly straightforward to exchange cartridges and to select the one you want to load based on the barcode of the cartridge it may sometimes be desirable to be able to change cartridges from a command prompt or within a script for example store open version 3.4 for Windows includes a utility called LTFS libutil for exactly that purpose so we'll go ahead and open an LTFS console window and if you type in LCFS libutil with no parameters it gives you a summary of the usage information the - I option is going to report information about the drive so let's try that LTFS libutil - i s : prints out information about the tape drive which is mounted as s the cartridge and the library that it's the drive is associated with you can also list out the cartridge slots in the library with the minus L option if you include - n then it suppresses the empty slots which is probably a good if you've got a lot of empty slots so and you that it'll tell you that we have two drives these are the cartridges in those drives and these are the other cartridges in storage slots and if we wanted to go ahead and mount for example this one BTT 165 we could do that we could change the S drive - oops - B BT t 1 6 5 5 we're going to ask it to be a bit more verbose as it does it and we want to put it in the S Drive so this is equivalent to doing the right-click operation it'll try and find that cartridge make sure it's in the library it'll try and unmount the volume that's currently in the tape drive return the cartridge to the storage slot then it selects cartridge you've asked for moves that into the tape drive if we look at the Explorer view at the moment you'll see that the S Drive currently has no cartridge because we just unloaded it and wend a load and remount is complete that should refresh to describe the new cartridge that we just loaded which should be 165 and there we are we now have test volume 2 loaded and mounted as our new s drive we could come across here right click and look at the cartridge and sure enough that is now 165 you'll notice that 164 is grayed out because that's in the T drive now so there we are that's a very quick overview of how storeOpen software now supports tape libraries and I hope you'll find that useful.

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