Two BE Media Servers, One Tape Library, None Simultaneous Jobs

[sleapz]

Hello,
I'm trying to get as much as I can out of a backup budget and am planning to buy a secondary NAS that will have BE installed on it for backup to disk, then duplicate to tape. We have a HP tape library that has two independent SAS controllers and I was wondering (have been unable to find any information regarding a scenario quite like this one) if anyone has connected two media servers to one tape library and alternated jobs. I understand that there is a SAN option that will allow this if the tape library is connected to the SAN. I'm hoping that the SAN module is only needed if I'm running simultaneous jobs writing to the library. An example of what I'm talking about is:

Server A: Duplicate to tape library A between 800A and 1200P
Server B: Duplicate to tape library A between 1201P and 400P

Has anyone done this or know if it will work?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Zerious]

I am not sure about this possibility when using a NAS. In your case is it possible for you to have one installation of backup exec and present a drive from the NAS to the BE server then duplicate to the media servers SAS tape drives. The only issue is that you will have bandwidth being used during the B2D job and during the Duplicate. This is an interesting case. I am also wondering if BE will lock the tape drive while it is writing to the drive unless the SAN storage option is being used. I had a similar issue with a Fibre Channel Library a long time ago.
If anything give Symantec a call, I'm curious about this one.


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