Are old SCSI tape drives not all created equal?

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Aug 17, 2016, at 12:18 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:11 PM, Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
>> 
>> ...
>> If you *really* want to see how this was screwed up, take a look at
>> Fibre Channel (which is basically SCSI over an optical Fibre network).
>> 
>> While the commands are standard, you can’t really build a Fibre Channel
>> configuration without using (a lot) of vendor unique commands.  And guess
>> what?  Each vendor has their own set!  It’s so bad that each combination
>> has to be tested (even down to the Fibre channel cards…the commands
>> they support are not all the same).  In other words, just because I have a
>> working configuration with brand A card, brand C switch and brand E
>> disk array, does not mean that I can put in a brand B switch and still expect
>> it all to work.  The sad thing is that the industry is/was happy with that.
> 
> But customers weren't, which is why iSCSI was so successful.  It offers the same capability but with a design goal of interoperability rather than the lack of it.

Yes, and most fibre channel companies (if they survived) have switched to iSCSI.
The other issue was that most folks that were doing fibre channel didn’t understand
networking *at all*.  This was part of the problem.  They were trying to “invent” things
like routing and bridging without understanding that the problems were well understood
and for the most part solved…so they invented their own things that didn’t work
particularly well.  Even when they did know about how networking protocols did things,
they decided to go their own way because they arrogantly believed that they knew
better and that storage was “different”.

Have many scars from doing battle with them trying to get them to change their ways.
It was one of only two times in my career that I’ve actually regretted working for a
company and had no positive experiences.

TTFN - Guy