The "shoe-shining" issue is resolved by enabling multiplexing on your 
backups. By having multiple jobs writing to the same tape, the tape 
doesn't have any idle time to shoe shine your drive.

I have 2 tape libraries, both with 12 drives a piece. All 24 drives and 
2 robots are presented to my 1 Linux Master, 2 Linux Media, and 3 Tru64 
SAN Media servers. All 6 systems see all 24 tapes drives and the robot 
for each library. The factor that allows me to do this is that my 6 
servers all have multipathing support built into the OS. If your Windows 
server is connected to a SAN, I'm 99% certain you have multipathing in 
your OS somewhere, either built into the kernel, added via a software 
pack, or managed by the HBAs on the server.

The way I understand SSO, is if you're using anything more complicated 
than a stand alone tape drive, then you need SSO (I could be totally 
incorrect here, this is me trying to summarize SSO in 20 words or less).

Given the little I know of your SSO configuration, I'd start with going 
over the way your SAN is zoned with a fine tooth comb. 90% of all the 
SSO issues I've had with my 2 libraries existed in the SAN itself, not 
in NetBackup or the libraries.

Hope this helps.

- Heathe Kyle Yeakley

David Turner wrote:
>
> 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
>
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