About media sharing
Media sharing allows media servers to share media for write purposes (backups).
Media sharing provides the following benefits:
Increases the utilization of media by reducing the number of partially full media.
Reduces media-related expenses because fewer tape volumes are required and fewer tape volumes are vaulted (NetBackup Vault option).
Reduces administrative overhead because you inject fewer scratch media into the robotic library.
Increases the media life because tapes 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.
You can configure the following media sharing:
Unrestricted media sharing.
Media media sharing with server groups.
Note:
The access control feature of Sun StorageTek 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.