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The typical way to design a SAN backup system is to dedicate master and media servers for the backup. It is true that only an agent on the application server will be used to determine what data has changed on the application server or handle locking for file systems.
The master server handles a database that keeps track of all backup activity for the system. The media servers are used to actually move the data from the disk through the switch to the tape system. If you use this approach, you can scale your SAN by adding disk, switches, media servers, and tape drives as appropriate. The nice thing is that the application servers are left to what they were meant to do: Run applications.
Most FC tape drives today are FC-LP (Loop) and will use an FL port from your switch. So, if you define the SAN to include the backup servers (which you should - since the SAN is more than just switching hardware), then you are correct: The data will stay inside the SAN, using the media servers for data movement.
Jim
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