About media sharing

Media sharing allows media servers to share media for write purposes (backups).

You can allow all media servers to share media, or you can configure a group of servers to share media.

Media sharing provides the following benefits:

Increases media utilization by reducing the number of partially full media.
Reduces media-related expenses because fewer media are required and fewer media are vaulted (NetBackup Vault option).
Reduces administrative overhead because you inject fewer scratch media into the robotic library.
Increases media life because media are mounted fewer times. Media are not repositioned and unmounted between write operations from different media servers.

Reducing media mounts requires appropriate hardware connectivity between the media servers that share media and the drives that can write to that media. Appropriate hardware connectivity may include Fibre Channel hubs or switches, SCSI multiplexors, or SCSI-to-fibre bridges.

Note:

The access control feature of Sun StorageTeck ACSLS controlled robots is not compatible with media sharing. Media sharing restricts volume access by the requesting hosts IP address. Use caution when you implement media sharing in an ACSLS environment.