Finding tape drives on remote servers.

[Rick_Morgan]

I have several computers with hp dat drives installed . I must be missing something, how do I configure backup exec 10d to find those tape drives and add them to a device pool? I figure since I have the drives why not use them over the network. I'm not worried about eating bandwidth, they would be smaller jobs.

-Rick

[Ken_Putnam]

While this is a common practice among *Nix Admins, BEWS is written such that the tape drivie must be locally attached to the media server, unless it is on a SAN, in which case you must also have an SSO (Shared Storage Option) for reach tape drive so attached

[Rick_Morgan]

So, your saying beckup exec won't perform that function.

-Rick

[Ken_Putnam]

Correct.

Locally attached tape drives or tape drives on a SAN, but no tape drives directly attached to other computers

[Hywel_Mallett]

As Ken says.
If you want to make use of the extra drives, your options are to move them to the BE server (you can have multiple drives on one server with no additional licenses), or buy a BE license for each machine with a drive, and then maybe a CASO license to administer them all.
Personally I'd choose the former.