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Sharing FC tape drives between NetApps

wfaulk
Not applicable
I have six tape drives in a library that are connected to a FibreChannel switch.  My (Windows 2003) Netbackup 6.0MP7 master server and two NetApps are also attached to the FC switch.  Right now, I have zones on the switch so that the NBMS is connected to two drives and the robot, and each NetApp is attached to two tape drives, with no overlap between zones.

I now have a new NetApp that I want to put into this system.  The new NetApp has a lot more data on it, so I definitely wanted to assign it at least two drives.  I could just change the two existing NetApps so that they each have one drive, but I was wondering if it was possible to share drives between two NetApps.  That is, have one of my FC zones connect two drives and two NetApps.  I know that this is at least in part a NetApp question, but I wanted to make sure that Netbackup could handle this configuration before I got started.
2 REPLIES 2

Abesama
Level 6
Partner

Sharing tape drives between NAS hosts is done by NetBackup tape drive multipathing - it's different to the traditional SSO.

From NetBackup 6.x you can configure more than one path for a tape drive - so you actually have one physical tape drive, and access it via multiple NAS hosts, that's possible with NetBackup.

A quote from "VERITAS NetBackup 6.0 Release Notes" page 11 for you.

= = =

Multi-path Shared Storage Option (SSO) for NDMP

This release of NetBackup offers a new dimension in drive configuration flexibility. Previous releases of NetBackup considered a drive to be shared only if the same drive was configured on more than one media server. This feature enables NetBackup to recognize multiple paths on a single media server to a single drive, making it possible for the same drive to be configured multiple times on one NetBackup media server. For the customer this means one media server can share all drives on all NAS/NDMP hosts and they need only have enough drives to sufficiently backup all filers.

Abesama
Level 6
Partner
Just open the admin gui, go to "Media and Device Management" tab then "Devices" then "Drvies"

On the right hand side pane, doubleclick on the drive, now you can add a path.

Abe