About Media Management Systems

The Media Management System (MMS) is a software interface that manages removable storage media such as tape libraries, tape drives, media pools, tape volumes, and disk resources that emulate tape drives and tape volumes. It is an implementation of the IEEE 1244 specification for removable media, providing media services for the OpenSolaris^TM OS.

In a storage architecture that includes a removable media management system, client applications such as backup applications connect to the removable media management interface, which manages various types of libraries and drives. The application communicates only with MMS and MMS communicates with the library or drive. If a site changes to a different library, the application does not need to be modified.

Configuration Without a Media Management System

Configuration With a Media Management System

The IEEE 1244 specification defines the following components of the removable media management system:

• Library manager software to contain specific information about each tape library
• Device manager software to contain specific information about device hardware
• MM server to manage the library and drive managers of each tape library and drive.
• Communication between the MM server and the applications, the Media Management Protocol (MMP) commands.

In this implementation of the specification for the OpenSolaris OS, the current version of the MMS 1.0 supports the following:

• Library managers for Sun StorageTek^TM L180,L500,L700,SL500 libraries
• Device managers for drives in the 9840,T9840B,T9840C,LTO1,LTO2,LTO3,LTO4 systems and device managers for 9940, 9840, LTO1, LTO2, LTO3, and LTO4 media
• PostgreSQL for the MM server's database.
• A command line interface to issue the most common Media Management Protocol commands.

The following figure shows the components of a typical Sun Microsystems solution with MMS.

Learn more about the MMS project for the OpenSolaris OS.

Learn more about OpenSolaris releases.

Configuration_With_a_Media_Management_System.png (image/png)
Configuration_Without_a_Media_Management_System.png (image/png)
mms_SUN.gif (image/gif)