Chapter 1 – Overview
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The nTier File Migrator software is hosted on an Windows server (for example, the
Spectra nTier700) running Microsoft Storage Server 2003 R2. The Windows server is
connected to a tape library or stand-alone tape drives and is always configured with a
dedicated logical drive that is managed by the nTier File Migrator software. Figure 1-1
shows a typical system configuration with a Spectra nTier700 and a single Spectra T50e
tape library.
When writing to and reading from tape, the system always uses the dedicated logical
drive for caching purposes. On writing to tape, a file is first written to magnetic disk
and after it has been successfully written to disk, the file goes into a queue for writing
to tape. On reading a file from tape, it is streamed onto disk cache and simultaneously
transferred over the network to fulfill the read request.
The system administrator defines policies that determine where data files are
physically stored. A single server may have many different policies, tailored to the
needs of the different file types that are being archived.
The file management policies are defined via the nTier File Migrator Archive
Management Console, which is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. Using
this snap-in provides a familiar administration interface which can be easily integrated
with other MMC snap-ins. The policies determine whether a file is written to tape and,
if so, allocates a specific group of tapes for the file. The policies also define whether
the tapes will be replicated and the schedule for replica updates.
Figure 1-1
An nTier700 running File Migrator and connected to a single T50 tape library.
nTier700 RAID running nTier File Migrator
Spectra T50e library
LAN
Clients
Fibre Channel or SCSI connection
