On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 4:54 AM, Terry Burton <tez AT terryburton.co DOT uk> 
wrote:
> It would still be great to avoid manually balancing the DLEs between
> configs in future if possible, so if any Amanda developers are able to
> supply their thoughts the future of simultaneous drive usage I would
> be most appreciative.

We're working on it, but as you can imagine there's a lot of old,
crufty code that makes assumptions about the number of devices in use,
so it's not going to be here soon.

Work is underway with a new Changer API that does implement locking
and permit simultaneous use of multiple devices.  This will be used
initially for a basic kind of "data vaulting" (copying dumps from one
set of volumes to another), where the source and destination volumes
may both be accessed by a changer.  The new API hasn't hit trunk yet,
as I'm still discovering flaws and bugs, but I'm happy to share what I
have if anyone is interested.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com