Billiam

Shot in the dark (except for maybe Beelzebub) but here goes...

A “previous administration” acquired a two drive tape library with fibre channel drives before doing sufficient research on how to actually implement it. Well, this has now fallen on my lap to figure out and I’m confused as hell after giving things a look over. Specifically where fibre channel zoning is concerned. For the sake of discussion, assume I only have one backup media server (BackupExec 2010) and that it has one single port HBA installed. Also, there is no multi-path anywhere in the fibre channel topology.

All of our current FC zoning is one-to-one but I don’t see how this can be maintained with FC-attached tape. From what I can tell, my backup media server, tape drive, and backup target all need to be in the same zone otherwise the media server can’t copy SAN LU contents from disk to tape over the SAN fabric. Correct?

If so, then does my backup media server need to have one fibre channel port installed for every FC-attached tape drive that it uses?

What if I want to backup more than one SAN attached target to a given tape drive? How do I go about zoning to accommodate that? Overlap multiple zones on the tape drive’s FC interface?

OK, now what if I want to use this same backup media server for other jobs that backup targets without SAN storage to SAN disk? Do I need to install yet another fibre channel port into the media server just for this purpose?

Oh and one last thing, the tape library has one fibre channel connection on each of its two tape drives. That’s it. There is no FC connection or regular SCSI connection on the library itself. I don't get how my backup media server can control the library’s robotics.