amanda-users, amanda-hackers,

Is support for simultaneously writing to multiple tape drives on the
Amanda roadmap? If so, when can this be reasonably expected? If not,
what are the major complexities prohibiting this development and is
there anything that is required in order to raise its priority?

My situation is that I manage an Amanda system that uses an MSL4048
dual-drive (LTO-4) library. The system is well tuned, writing as fast
as can be expected to a single drive for the duration of the backup
run. Obviously I could split my Amanda configuration which I may soon
have to do, but I would like to know where Amanda is heading in the
medium-term regarding this issue. I may eventually need to upgrade to
a quad-drive system (or switch technology) to obtain the transfer rate
required to archive some of our huge bioinformatics volumes in the
available time window.

And as an aside, would anybody please care to comment about their
experience of running a split configuration on a single backup host
using a single changer library. For example, does chg-zd-mtx play
nicely with multiple accessors, or are there other, non-obvious
problems that make this a bad idea.


Many thanks,

Terry