Best possible definition is in the
SAN Client Troubleshooting Guide. Extract:
In NetBackup, the SAN Client feature is comprised of three parts: SAN Clients, Fibre Transport Media Servers, and the Fibre Service Manager.
SAN Clients are actually standalone NetBackup Clients with a service enabled that allows the client to send data for backup and restores across a SAN fabric to a Media Server. The SAN Client service is available on a subset of the NetBackup Tier one clients including Solaris, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX.
The Media Server used for these SAN transfers is referred to as a Fibre Transport Media Server because of the Fibre Transport services which are used to present Target Devices on a SAN. Only 64bit Solaris SPARC and Linux x86_64 platforms are supported as Fibre Transport servers. The Fibre Transport services include driver level components which operate on a device level with QLogic hardware.
The Master Server includes a FT Service Manager (FSM) table in the EMM database. FSM is the component that tracks the status and configuration of SAN Clients and Media Servers. FSM is also used to manage the relationships of SAN Clients and Fibre Transport Media Servers to determine whether a NetBackup data transfer is eligible for a Fibre Transport.
