Tape drive selection for SAP r/3 Landscape

[sreeramam]

Dear frinds,

We are presently in the process of selection of Tape drive for our sap r/3 landscape. I.e, in the process of sap sizing.

My backup requirements are upto 1 TB. We have development QA and PRD servers in our landscape. We are planning for SAN based storage solution.



What I would like to know are as follows...

1. We are planning for SAN Based Tepe library.

With SAN Based tape library is it manditory to use Backup manager to initiate backup and restore operations.

My question is b'cos i need to upgrade skillset to manage HP Backup manager.

Is it possible to mount the Single SAN Based Tape drive on my Development, QA and PRD as if they appear as local drives (file system )on the servers. If this is not possible i need to know about the tape drive which can be mounted as local tape drive.
I want only one tape drive in my landscap and I must be able to use sap r/3 tools to backup and restore.


Keeping presice my expectation what i want to know is : I want to conduct backup and restore operations in my SAP r/3 landscape with single tape drive and using SAP BRtools only( i.e. using DB13/ BRtools from command mode ).

It would be great suggested and participated in discussion.

Thanks and Regards,
Sree Ramam SNV
09840411017

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Assuming this is a UNIX environment, its certainly possible to configure a single SAN attached tape library to be qavailable to all your SAN attached hosts - they will all effectively 'see' this tape drive as a locally attached drive. For Windows environments you may find that the act of installing the standard tape driver causes a SCSI reserve which would prevent other hosts from accessing the tape drive.

Probably an MSL6030L2 would do for you (up to 2 LTO2 tape drives and 30 slots).

However the point is that without some sort of backup management software (like HP Data Protector, Veritas Netbackup, or Legato Networker), there is nothing to manage concurrent access to the tape drive - so one host doesn't know that another host is currently using the tape drive. This can lead to many errors and large management headaches.

Given the typical costs of implementing SAP, the costs for some decent backup software are fairly insignificant - all the products I mentioned above have integrations with SAP BRtools which will allow you to continue to use brbackup/brrestore/brarchive and DB13 transactions if you wish to.

HTH

Duncan

[sreeramam]

Thank you for the response.

My understaning from your analysis.

1. We can mount SAN based tape drive on individual systems as local devices.

Thanks and regards,
Sree Ramam SNV