| You must login as the arcroot user (or have equivilent permissions) in order to configure device groups. |
As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, one of ARCserveIT's key features is its ability to run jobs concurrently.
You can have up to 7 device drives (per adapter) connected to your host using your host's built-in SCSI port. You can also divide these device drives into "groups". By default, ARCserveIT is installed with one group for each device drive that is attached to your host. These default groups are named after the planets in our solar system, excluding Earth. (The planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.) Therefore, if you have two drives, ARCserveIT will set up two groups called "MERCURY" and "VENUS". You can then modify these device group assignments using the instructions over the next few pages.
If you have multiple groups, you can attach drives to each group and take advantage of "parallel streaming". Parallel streaming means that you can have more than one job running at a time. For example, you could assign drives 1 and 2 to a group called "GROUP1" and assign drives 4, 5, and 6 to a group called "GROUP2". You could then have a backup job running at GROUP1 while a restore job runs at GROUP2.
If you group drives into a single group, you will be able to take advantage of "drive spanning", where when one media becomes full, the backup session automatically spans to the next drive in the same group.
There is really only one rule for grouping device drives: All of the device drives in a group must be identical (same brand and model).
As mentioned on the previous page, when you install ARCserveIT, the drives are automatically grouped for you. If you have five drives attached to the server, regardless of whether they are all identical, you will have five groups. After you start ARCserveIT, you can use the directions that follow in this section to:
