Connecting 2 sans

I do really want to thank you for taking your time and energy to helping me!!    

If the sw's were connected I could do all three media agents.

only have 3 slots of the correct type.

I guess 2 can go newer cx4 and 1 to cx500

Can’t get a couple of more HBAs ?

Fabric Interoperability:

Merging Fabrics Based on M-series and

B-series Fibre Channel Switches

Application Notes

I think this may have the information that we need.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01937838/c01937838.pdf

this looks promising ..i'll look it over tonight.  I see your point, if you have a bunch of agents that would be waisting a lot of ports, HBAs, cables to have a host span multiple fabrics. How hard would it be to schedule downtime for 5300 to enable interop mode ? What kind of hosts connected to it ?

I can do it over the weekend, but don't you only need to take down one 5300 at a time reconfigure both ends bring back up, then do other switch? This is the first of 2 switches. Or the best time is when we have 2 weeks off for Christmas starting at the end of day on 12/17- 1/3/11 almost everyone is gone. Is there a way to transfer or attach a file for you. After looking at this payroll and student records are not on here. Archive is about 8 TB and mail about the same. I thought you gave up on me and wouldn't blame you.

PL_LISD wrote: I thought you gave up on me and wouldn't blame you.

i don't give up that easily . What you are trying to do is not hard, we just need to have all of our ducks in a row to do it right the first time with minimal impact. Message me privately so we can resume via email.

How do you backup from a client over the SAN ? I can only think of VCB like solutions for virtual machines and client to tape over SAN, where each client has tape drive access. Is there another way ?

That's the only SAN based backup I can image as well. But would you want to do it like this ? I mean: I have 600+ clients and only 8 tape drives.... and each hour I have 100+ jobs running for transaction log backups of important database servers. I'm affraid I'll run out of free drives very quickly.... We have (CommVault) Media Agents that store the backup data on disk first and every 30 minutes or so all backup data which hasn't been stored on tape will be stored on tape at that point. These Media Agents use SAN based backup on tape indeed.

Automatically Adding Data Paths for Existing Libraries

When multiple MediaAgents share the same library (SAN DDS, or direct-attached shared library configurations) the system can automatically add the alternate data paths for each of the storage policies, when this option is enabled. As each of these data paths (MediaAgent, Library, Drive Pool and Scratch Pool) use the same resources, additional index cache configuration is not required. In addition, the criteria for using the alternate data path (described in the following section) must also be specified.

Defining the Criteria for Using Alternate Data Paths

A storage policy can be configured to use an alternate data path using the following criteria:

• When resources are busy or offline - use this option to configure your system to use an alternate data path when resources are busy or offline.
  
• Load balance between the data paths - use this option to evenly distribute data protection operations amongst drive-pools, thereby not overloading a specific drive-pool.
  
• LAN preferred datapath - use this option to automatically perform LAN-free data protection operations.
  

If you zone switches for both san's, and FC Library load the media agent configure a new or extisting storage policy. You can use lan prefered datapath option to acomplish this.

if you have a shared tape library, you can present shared tape resources to multiple hosts. On the host itself you have to load "storage node" software and license. This software talks back to our backup server to figure out when tape resources are available and when the backup starts, control traffic (metadata) goes over IP while data flows over FC connected tape drives.

We are not as big, only have 200+ servers and 40 servers with sql hourly transactional log.

The problem we have is only one san can see the tape library; the other san is on a separate fabric.

I also called CV's media support to check and see if it is doable.

Not to change subjects but.

What kind of dedup product do you have, is it a appliance or CV's?

We are just going to get a PoD upgrade license and get more SFP's for the 5300.

Then plug in the other san, library drives that will take 8 ports and backup servers to 5300.

Thanks for the help everyone!