What are the advantages of setting up a robotic library with FC technology LTO5 drive as SCSI Pass-Through Direct in netbackup 7.1?

[Paulo_Mendez]

What are the advantages of setting up a robotic library with FC technology LTO5 drive as SCSI Pass-Through Direct in netbackup 7.1?

on the one hand reduce the level of OS-level emulation and Netbackup interacts directly

[Marianne]

Which OS?

See chapter for your OS in NBU Device Configuration Guide http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC3656
  to see if pass-through device access is required.

[mph999]

If the os type requires a pass-thru driver (for example Solaris) if you do not configure it, very simply, it will not work.

Windows, for example requirees no pass-thru driver.

"on the one hand reduce the level of OS-level emulation and Netbackup interacts directly" - NBU does not directly communicate to the drives for operations such as read/ write/ positioning, this is always done by the os.

On systems that require a pass-thru driver (eg. Solaris) then NBU passes various scsi_commands to the devices (eg. test unit ready) as these scsi commands cannot be passed to the device via the regular os driver.

Martin

[Paulo_Mendez]

It is Netbackup 7.1 in the operating system is Windows 2008 R2 SP1

[mph999]

Windows does not require a pass thru driver.

Martin

[Paulo_Mendez]

In terms of efficiency, I mean that Solaris is more efficient to handle pass-thru driver natively.

What disadvantage of windows is not supported and there are more emulations?

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

There is no question of one being more efficient than the other,

There are no disadvantaes of having the pass through driver, in terms of efficieny, or performance.

All it means is that some scsi -commands have to go via the pass-thru as opposed to the os tape driver.

The disadvantage off the pass through driver, certainly on Solaris , is simply that you have to configure it.  But once configured, you can forget about it.

Look at it this way :

If I gave you two systems windows and solaris, you will not see any differnece between them due to the fact one has a pass-thru and one does not.

Solaris has it's own pass-thru, but NBU uses its own - it make no difference.

There is no disadvantage with windows not having a pass-thru driver.

Martin

[Paulo_Mendez]

thanks for the explanation Martin