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.

 

 

 

 

 

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