2010/1/12 William Brown <william.d.brown AT gsk DOT com>:
> Don't confuse the confusing names Symantec uses!
>
> A SAN Media Server backs up it's own disks (only) and sends the data over the 
> SAN to SAN-attached tape drives (commonly)
>
> A normal Media Server (licence is double the list price) also send data to 
> storage just the same as a SAN Media Server, but can pull data in from LAN 
> clients, or (with a very limited support matrix for target HBAs) can pull 
> data from SAN Clients.
>
> So you cannot "backing up client X via a SAN media server, but sending data 
> over the LAN" unless your SAN Media Server is using network-attached storage 
> like NAS or OST.
>
> The name "SAN Media Server" is very confusing, especially since they 
> introduced the SAN Client, and even more so since they share a licence 
> ("Enterprise Client").   The SAN Media Server is just a Media Server that 
> cannot support remote clients.  If you look at the detail of the licence 
> you'll see the 'remote client' option is missing.

We have no need for this server to back up other clients, but we need
to get the data off the host within a 30 min window.
To be able to do that, we need to use the SAN for transport,
preferably directly to tape.

To provide some background:

The system in question comes bundled with its own backup solution
(TSM) of which we have no control (it's essentially a black box
to us). TSM writes it backup to disk volumes. We are allowed to freeze
the TSM volumes for 30 minutes to get the data
off the host to our backup solution.

We already have an SSO option, so from what I can see, we now only
need a SAN Media Server license for the server
so it can send its data over the SAN directly to tape.


-- 
Thomas H. Espe
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