I've been crawling the NDMP manual for an hour but haven't found a
black-and-white answer yet.

I have a number of Netapp Filers and we're looking at implementing NDMP
backups (we currently just backup NFS mounts).  I know I cannot share a set
of drives between my NDMP hosts & my other media servers.  We're OK with the
idea of carving out a set of drives exclusively for NDMP backups (yes, I
know about v6.0 - we're not quite ready to convert yet).

What I can't figure out is if a single SAN-connected drive can be shared
directly with more than one filer.  I can see that if I do a 3rd-party NDMP
backup, the a single NDMP host can be used to backup the others.  I'd rather
not load one filer or media server with the backups of another.  I'd like
the blocks to go as directly to media as possible.

The drive setup seems to specify which NDMP host has direct access to the
drive, I guess to do what I want, I'd have to define the same robotic drive
on more than one NDMP host.  My initial goal is to remove 4 drives from my
regular drive config & share them between the 7 filers, each grabbing any
drive as required.

Baring this, an option would be to define a directly attached drive for each
filer, utilizing more drives, then build storage unit groups where each
filer would use their own storage unit first, failing to another 3rd-party
host only if their drive is already too busy.  So, can NDMP storage units be
grouped?

For those with v6.0, are your SSO sharing your drives with your filers and
how's it working out?

-M



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  Mark Donaldson - Systems Administrator - 303-664-2040
  Corporate Express - Broomfield, Colorado
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  We have enough youth.  How about a fountain of smart?
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