Acquiring a Drive in a SAN

A drive in your SAN can be acquired for the exclusive use of a specific Windows for the duration of a task. This eliminates problems such as unwanted interference from other machines, accidental tape label overwrites, and hardware access delays. When a drive is acquired for a particular device server, no application or driver on another machine on the SAN can access that drive until DPX explicitly releases the drive.

You can only acquire drives that report Unique IDs. The feature works with any drive for which DPX has saved a Unique ID. See the description of the Unique ID field under Adding a Device.

If a power failure occurs on a machine for which a drive has been acquired but not yet released, follow either of these steps to avoid problems:

• Attempt to acquire and release the drive from the machine that was using the drive last. (You can attempt to re-read the tape label using the device path of the machine that used the drive last.)

• Power cycle the drive that was acquired.