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| | SAN Registration Service |
Efficient device management |
In most cases, conventional SCSI device interface technology requires the fixed assignment of backup devices to hosts. Typically, the result is poor utilization of sophisticated (and pricey) peripherals, such as tape, disk and optical storage drives. After a few hours of peak load during the backup, they could remain idle for the rest of the day. Such rigid allocation, however, ceases to be a problem when Fibre Channel technology is employed in, for example, a storage area network (SAN).
The SRS advantage in SANs
Since Fibre Channel enables devices to be addressed by multiple computers, they can be used by all hosts connected to the SAN. The main advantage is that tape drives in media changers can be used by multiple NetWorker servers or storage nodes in what is referred to as dynamic drive sharing. Here, drives are allocated to NetWorker computers as needed for pending backup and restore runs. The necessary synchronization between the different computers is handled by SAN Registration Service (SRS). This NetWorker add-on module makes it possible to switch drives in silos between multiple NetWorker servers and their storage nodes, and drives in SCSI jukeboxes between the NetWorker server and its storage nodes. Users profit from the fact that local backups (LANless) are possible without needing expensive (and underutilized) backup drives for each computer.
Product highlights- Theoretically, all devices in a SAN can be addressed by all computers. This enables the time-staggered use of available tape devices by multiple hosts.
- To prevent uncontrolled access by a host to a drive that is currently being used by another system, cross-computer or cross-application synchronization is required between all hosts participating in this device sharing arrangement. The task of synchronizing access to the shared backup devices is handled by SRS.
- SRS is installed on one of the participating UNIX hosts and offers the applications an RPC-based interface through which the required devices can be committed and released. Other applications can also be connected to SRS using open RPC interfaces.
- SRS fits well into existing NetWorker configurations because it keeps configuration data and current status in familiar NetWorker-like resource files. SRS configuration is performed the same way as for NetWorker.
- SRS is available for Linux and Solaris enabling users of Fujitsu Siemens Computers NetWorker to share peripheral devices between NetWorker servers and storage nodes.
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