This is the only tape library and is being presented to the primary filers via FC. There is a secondary san for snapvaulting that isn't offsite (no fc ports either), hence the requirement for tape. In my head the tape should only be used for compliance really, and ideally never have to be used!
Frank, that looks promising, however the tape library doesn't show up as an option. I think the issue I am having it the entire library is only zoned into the filer heads and not to any media agents.
And you obviously can't create a filer as a media agent, which would have sorted my issue out. The problem here is that the all my backup servers are virtual vm's that do not use FC connectivity on the esx hosts, its all NFS storage, so I couldn't get creative and try to use something like npiv to present a vm media agent onto the fabric, not that I'd want to really! Hmm.
I noticed in the Snap POC cookbook I have that where it talks about tape, there are two examples, both have the tape library controller zoned into a media agent, and in example one the tapes are zoned directly to the filers, and in the second example the tapes and the library controller are all presented to a media agent. Either way it looks like I could then select the tape library as a data path in an existing storage policy as you've described.
I think in my scenario with the way its currently setup, I am going to have a separate storage policy / retention rules / backupsets / subclients etc etc and perform backups independent of my current snapshots? So it'll likely have its own index etc associated to it. Would that mean its own snapshots etc on the primary volume (has to be from the primary volume just in case the backup san is moved to a secondary location, which then to me would mean tape drive is legacy if backup san was moved to a secondary site, but politics...!), I just want 52 weekly full archived off to tape and a yearly that never ages, is that too much to ask!!!
I'm not sure if this is even possible, what I'm thinking, or if I should even go down that route or not, any ideas welcome! Should I be looking at getting a media agent to see the library? Or should I be able to do weeklys / yearlys easily enough. All the tapes in the magazines are being seen, even the tapes barcode labels etc so it does look like it should be ready to go, but maybe not...!
I may be getting bogged down with that's how you could do it with native NetApp again here.....and not taking into account I'm limited by the way ndmp works too. I'm need to understand what the relationship is between SnapProtect backup to tape and how the volumes are backed up to tape in different scenarios and pretend NetApp doesn't exist I think.
