Hi, folks,

I'm about to dip my toe into the world of Veritas Netbackup (actually,
for the amount I'm spending, I'll be dipping my whole body, I think!)

I'm stuck on one point - we've got a number of systems on a SAN and want
to implement NetBack SAN-ready. To that end, we'll be pursuing the
Shared Storage option drive sharing for all of our tape drives (15 DLT
7000s in 3 jukeboxes), and we'll have in total 6 media servers including
the master, a slave and 4 other big systems (with databases & big file
systems, etc). Maybe overkill...

Anyway, the question I've got is regarding the hardware - the master is
going to be either a Sun Enterprise 420R or Enterprise 450, and the
slave is going to be an Enterprise 220R. Both systems will have 2 CPUs
and a GB of memory.

What I don't know is how many tape drives I can reasonably expect to
drive from a single FC/AL PCI card in each server. Obviously, for a
large part of the time, the other media servers will be using the
drives, but I'll have about 90 other systems backing up and would like
to drive the drives @ full speed...

Is there a rule of thumb here? With differential SCSI, the rule was 2
drives per bus, but nobody seems to know with FC/AL...

Thanks!

Ross


-- 
Ross Parker            |      UNIX Sys Admin, Perl and C,
Systems/Network Admin  |        Networking and security
Telus Mobility         |
                       |      Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal
parker AT bctm DOT com        |   with fingernail clippings mixed in (Larry 
Wall)