* Terry Burton <tez AT terryburton.co DOT uk> [20081003 12:47]:
> 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?

can't comment on that, but read below...

[...]
 
> 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.

I've been running multiple configurations on single server for years.
Last year I added 2 changers with 2 LTO3 drives each in 24 slots
library to backup +20TB of data. Each server has 2 config concurrently
accessing the robot with chg-zd-mtx. It can be achieved with minimum
difficulties if you have sufficient holding disk space and use tape
spanning. Back in the days, I was even using a 8 drives library split
in 8 configs and sometimes I would experience robot contention unless
I was using some kind of 'ticket' so that only one instance of amanda
would run at a given time. It was a bad hack but it worked reasonnably
well given that this was pre-tape-spanning and care had to be taken
wrt to the udp/tcp port range, etc, but this is all moot now as you
can use bsdtcp authentication with recent versions of amanda.
I'm sure others have done better (eg, think RAIT) so take this with
a grain of salt!

hth,
jf

> 
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Terry

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<° ><