The appliance supports backup and restore using both a local configuration, in which tape drives are physically attached to the appliance, and a remote configuration, in which data is streamed to another system on the same network. In both cases, the backup must be managed by a supported DMA.
In local configurations, supported tape devices, including both drives and changers (robots), are physically connected to the system using a supported SCSI or Fibre Channel (FC) card configured in Initiator mode. These devices can be viewed on the NDMP Status screen. The NDMP service presents these devices to a DMA when the DMA scans for devices. Once configured in the DMA, these devices are available for backup and restore of the appliance or other systems on the same network. After adding tape drives or changers to the system or removing such devices from the system, a reboot may be required before the changes will be recognized by the NDMP service. After that, the DMA may need to be reconfigured because tape device names may have changed.
In remote configurations, the tape devices are not physically connected to the system being backed up and restored (the data server) but rather to the system running the DMA or a separate system (the tape server). These are commonly called "3-way configurations" because the DMA controls two other systems. In these configurations, the data stream is transmitted between the data server and the tape server over an IP network.