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What tape reservations are

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Multiple storage systems can share access to tape drives, medium changers, bridges, or tape libraries. Tape reservations ensure that only one storage system accesses a device at any particular time by enabling either the SCSI Reserve/Release mechanism or SCSI Persistent Reservations for all tape drives, medium changers, bridges, and tape libraries.

Note

All the systems that share devices in a library, whether switches are involved or not, must use the same reservation method.

The SCSI Reserve/Release mechanism for reserving devices works well under normal conditions. However, during interface error recovery procedures, reservations can be lost. If this occurs, initiators other than the reserved owner can access the device.

Reservations made with SCSI Persistent Reservations are not affected by error recovery mechanisms, such as loop reset or target reset; however, not all devices implement SCSI Persistent Reservations correctly.