A stand-alone library is a one or multi drive storage unit with no media storage capability, no media changer, and no barcode reader.
Note
- As stand-alone drives do not have the facility to store used media, it is your responsibility to label and store all used media in a secure and accessible location.
- Stand-alone drives are not supported on virtual machines.
Single Stand-Alone Drive Library
The stand-alone drive is physically attached to the MediaAgent that controls the library. For instructions to add a stand-alone drive, see Configuring a Tape Storage.
Drive Pooling Stand-Alone Drives
Several stand-alone drives with the same drive type are attached to a MediaAgent. These stand-alone drives can be pooled together as a Drive Pool. For instructions to add a drive pool, see Configuring a Tape Storage. During configuration, select a tape drive library that contains multiple drives.
Drive pooling offers the following advantages:
-
Automatic Tape spanning for large data protection operations
When performing large data protection operations, the operation will automatically span to another media in another drive when the currently active media is full, without any manual user intervention.
-
Facility to perform multi-streamed data protection jobs
Multiple streams provide the means to parallelize an operation and thus improve the rate at which data can be written to or retrieved from the storage media. As each stream requires a drive and a storage media, drive pooling provides the facility to run multi-streamed data protection operations.