The SAN Environment

The servers within a SAN group include one primary SAN server and one or more SAN-attached member servers. The primary SAN server is the most important server because no tasks can occur until it initializes the tape libraries on the SAN.

The primary SAN server is responsible for the following actions:

• Initializes, governs, and maintains a shared device on the SAN
• Coordinates the use of shared library resources among the servers in the SAN, preventing conflict if two servers try to allocate a device or media at the same time

You can designate any Arcserve Backup SAN server as the primary SAN server. However, because the primary SAN server is responsible for managing and initializing the shared SAN, you should use your most reliable server as the primary SAN server.