SAN Media server

[liuyang]

Hi, my master server is NBU 7.0.1 on Windows 2008 R2. I have 4 tape drives in the tape library (interface is FC). I have a client server (windows 2003) and I want to connect this client to the tape library via FC.

So I think I need to convert this client to a SAN media server, is it? And shall I give the client a dedicated tape drive? Or just give it access to all tape drives and it will automatically select during backup?

Thanks.

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

To write data to tapes directly from your windows 2003 host, you need to uninstall the client softoware and install server software. SAN media server is licensed with Enterprise Client license, and media server is licensed with Enterprise Server license.

In addition, you need Library-based tape drive license for each physical drive, or Enterprise Disk license for VTL.

Without Shared Storage Option license, you can only configure dedicated physical tape drives on media server. IF you want to share physical tape drives with other media servers, purchase SSO license for each sharing drives.

[liuyang]

Thanks for your replies. Is it recommended to give a dedicated tape drive for each SAN media server? And if that dirve is not available (maybe doing other backup jobs), the backup job of the SAN media server will be queued, is it?

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

If you have enough free drives to let them dedicated, and you can get enough performance with them, configuring as dedicated is more simple than sharing configuration.

Otherwise, if no enough drives to configure as dedicated, SSO is cost-effective solution. If all drives are active with backup on other servers, backup jobs wil be queued.