The "shoe-shining" issue is resolved by enabling multiplexing on your backups. By having multiple jobs writing to the same tape, the tape doesn't have any idle time to shoe shine your drive.
I have 2 tape libraries, both with 12 drives a piece. All 24 drives and 2 robots are presented to my 1 Linux Master, 2 Linux Media, and 3 Tru64 SAN Media servers. All 6 systems see all 24 tapes drives and the robot for each library. The factor that allows me to do this is that my 6 servers all have multipathing support built into the OS. If your Windows server is connected to a SAN, I'm 99% certain you have multipathing in your OS somewhere, either built into the kernel, added via a software pack, or managed by the HBAs on the server. The way I understand SSO, is if you're using anything more complicated than a stand alone tape drive, then you need SSO (I could be totally incorrect here, this is me trying to summarize SSO in 20 words or less). Given the little I know of your SSO configuration, I'd start with going over the way your SAN is zoned with a fine tooth comb. 90% of all the SSO issues I've had with my 2 libraries existed in the SAN itself, not in NetBackup or the libraries. Hope this helps. - Heathe Kyle Yeakley David Turner wrote: > > I have 1 windows master running Netbackup 6.5 with 3 media servers. I > have Storagetek/Sun SL8500 with 8 LTO3 tape drives (2 drives are > dedicated via NDMP to a Netapp 3050). All drives are connected via FC > to brocade etc. we have the Shared storage option but I don’t think > it’s working properly. How can I verify that its working? > > I believe the engineers that configured the zoning on the switch > dedicated 2 drives per server and dedicate 2 to the Netapp. Did it > makes sense to purchase SSO? > > I was told you should only have 2 LTO3 drives per servers because of > “shoe shining” and the servers ability to handle more than 2 drives > (Dell 2950’s quad cores with 8gig of ram). I am wondering if the > switch should be rezoned to make use of SSO or can the zoning have an > impact on how SSO should be configured? How can these 2 play together? > > As you can see I am all confused and would love for someone to explain > this in simple terms. > > thanks > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Veritas-bu maillist - [email protected] > http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu > _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - [email protected] http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
