Are old SCSI tape drives not all created equal?

[Paul Koning]

> 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.

	paul