Creating backup and restore jobs with the SAN Shared Storage Option is identical to creating jobs in a non-shared storage environment. You can also create test run jobs, resource discovery jobs, and duplicate backup data jobs.

While the SAN Shared Storage Option does not provide a central view of the jobs scheduled on all servers on the SAN, you can always view your scheduled, active, and completed jobs on the media server to which you submitted the jobs by selecting Job Monitor from the navigation bar.

With the SAN Shared Storage Option enabled, all of the media servers share access to the storage devices through the shared ADAMM database. The server that reserves the storage device first runs its job first. Therefore, a job scheduled by a server may not run exactly when scheduled if all the storage devices are being used by other servers.

When a server releases control of a device, there is a short delay before the server looks for additional jobs to process. This delay provides a window of opportunity for other media servers to reserve the shared storage device.

If a device fails during a nonrecurring job, that job will fail and will be rescheduled on hold. If a device fails during a recurring job, the job is rescheduled. The device is then released for the next job scheduled for that device. But, depending on why the device failed, the second job may become trapped. This might prevent other jobs from seeing the device, running to normal completion, or failing and being rescheduled to an "on hold" status. If you determine that a device is malfunctioning, you may want to retarget jobs to another drive or quickly replace the failed drive and resume the jobs that were placed on hold.