About devices in the SAN Shared Storage Option

At startup, Backup Exec recognizes all local storage devices as well as the storage devices on the SAN. If you do not see one or more of your attached storage devices or if the shared storage devices do not appear when Devices is selected from the navigation bar, use the Device Configuration Wizard. This wizard guides you through installing the appropriate drivers for the storage hardware connected to your system.

Note:

The SAN Shared Storage Option must be installed for Backup Exec to recognize any devices connected to Fibre Channel Switched Fabric (FC-SW). FC-SW is a fibre channel configuration in which the devices are connected in a network using a fibre channel switch.

Storage devices are categorized as either robotic libraries or stand-alone drives. The Library Expansion Option is required to support robotic libraries with multiple tape drives.

See Configuring multi-drive robotic libraries.

If you need to add a new device to the SAN after you install Backup Exec, follow your storage network vendor's instructions. After you add the new device, reboot the Backup Exec database server to verify that the new device is recognized. You should reboot the other media servers according to your storage network vendor's instructions because some vendors do not support booting multiple servers concurrently or booting any server while active jobs are running.

Backup Exec's device management feature provides the following functionality for the secondary storage units on a SAN:

Device allocation. Jobs must first reserve the shared secondary backup devices before they can be used. The job that gains a reservation on a drive keeps it reserved while the drive is in use. The drive is released after a job completes, which allows other jobs to compete for it.
Drive pools. You can assign the drives to drive pools in which one or more drives are combined as a backup target. Jobs submitted to a particular drive pool run on the first available drive in that pool. You can also submit a job to a selected individual drive in the drive pool.

Note:

Cascaded drive pools, in which multiple drives are linked together to create the appearance of one drive with greater capacity, are not supported for shared storage environments.