I agree if you are only zoning each drive to one media server the SSO is not needed.
However! If those two drives fail - bad tape - bad whatever and are down then that media server has NO tape drives avail. I have 18 tape drives and have zoned all 18 to all of them to all 4 of my media servers. So they use tape drives based on NB's algorithm of which drive to use next kind of evening out the usage some what, and if two drives go down the there are still 16 drives available for the media server to try and find one not busy. ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Donaldson, Mark Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:05 PM To: David Turner; [email protected] Cc: Will Tucker Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] SSO Option for LTO3 drives If a drive is visible to one and only one server because of zoning , then SSO isn't necessary. SSO is used to share a single drive among multiple media servers. Each server uses it in turn but then releases it after use to be used by a different server. While you may be licensed for SSO, what you're describing won't need it. You could still limit the use of drives by each media server through multiple techniques - storage units "max drive" setting comes to mind - so that only X number of drives are used simultaneously per media server. You could still have it choose that X drives from a shared pool of all your drives. I suspect your servers are more than capable of keeping two drives busy (subject to throttling introduced by your back-end SAN & HBA speeds). Your storage guys are, IMO, being too conservative. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Turner Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 2:55 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Will Tucker Subject: [Veritas-bu] SSO Option for LTO3 drives 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
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