Re: [Veritas-bu] Library

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Matthews, Gary (GSD UK Production Services business) <gary.b.matthews AT logica DOT com> wrote:

Just after a few opinions. I’ve been asked to put in a new SAN with NBU from scratch. The library’s a fairly hefty box, a sun SL3000. It’s only got 2 fibre drives at the moment for testing but will have several more going live. I was wondering what would be the best way to go connectivity wise – all going through 1 switch, 2 switches on 1 fabric or a switch on both fabrics?

Personally, we have multiple fabrics but they're used for disk as well as tape. We have dual dual-port HBAs in each media server - one pair for disk and one pair for tape. We have a dedicated SCSI card for robotic control on our master server but I don't know if the SL3000 supports that.

The tough part is ensuring that you have enough HBA ports on your media servers to drive the tape drives. That's a bit tougher to configure with only a single fabric (have fun with zoning!). Remember, with 3:1 compression, a single LTO-4 can consume an entire 4Gbps HBA port.

If you're going to be using that SAN for disk access (for catalog or DSSU), then definitely put in dual fabrics.

Lastly, remember that hefty libraries & drives don't do you any good if you don't have hefty media servers. I suspect when you do the data flow of how you're going to drive those tape drives from your new hefty media servers, you may answer the question as to how many fabrics you will build.

.../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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