One of our customers with a site similar uses a quad Xeon Dell system with 2 GB of memory and all disk on their SAN. His db is in the 60GB range.
I would think that an optimal local disk configuration would be JBOD or perhaps two RAID sets one with the DB/Log and the other for storage pools. Use a RAID controller with plenty of cache to help out with performance. I would even consider JBOD for the storage pool volumes. You could even do JBOD and use TSM mirroring for the db and log (this is the best performing option) and no RAID. Since PCI SCSI adapters are cheap and 9840s are very fast I would probably opt for one drive per channel using Adaptec 39160 controllers. In general we configure two drives per channel but we're usually using slower drives so this works fine. As soon as we think we have a bottleneck there we'll add controllers. Kelly J. Lipp Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc. PO Box 51313 Colorado Springs, CO 80949 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.storsol.com or www.storserver.com (719)531-5926 Fax: (240)539-7175 -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Prather, Wanda Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 12:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: TSM Server on Windows - Does it work? Kelly (and others), This is VERY interesting, as I need to find an upgrade path for our largest TSM server. Can you give me some info about your I/O config for these Windows servers? How many paths to the disk/ what type? My current server is AIX on an F50, no problem with cycles. Four 9840 drives, we do reclaim pretty much around the clock. My concern in trying to move to Windows is the disk. The DB is 28 GB and I have to expire about 100000 objects per day. I had to give up using rollforward mode to get enough speed to handle the daily reclamation. The I/O is spread across 3 buses for TSM plus a fourth for root. Two of the buses have SSA disk; the other 2 are ultrascsi. All are JBOD. And the F50 still spends a lot of time in I/O wait, it's busy constantly. Any idea what type of Windows disk config could handle this? -----Original Message----- From: Kelly Lipp [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 10:59 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: TSM Server on Windows - Does it work? We routinely use our STORServer 400/500 platform in an environment of this size: Windows 2000 Server on Intel Dual (or perhaps quad) processor, 1 GB memory and ~300 GB or so of disk space. We use AIT2 (currently) tape technology and have plenty of time for reclamation, etc. This configuration works well for us. I also know of a another site that uses a quad Dell Xeon 700 Mhz system to backup about twice as much daily as you suggest. Their tape technology is STK 9840 which is considerably faster than AIT (and practically anything else for that matter). Works fine. So, yes, you can handle fairly large environments with a Windows platform. And depending on how adamant you are about staying with a platform, independent of scalability, you can always add another system and split the load. Although that shouldn't be necessary in this case. Kelly J. Lipp Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc. PO Box 51313 Colorado Springs, CO 80949 [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.storsol.com or www.storserver.com (719)531-5926 Fax: (240)539-7175 -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Seay, Paul Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 6:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: TSM Server on Windows - Does it work? The number I would be more interested in is the size of your database. How many files are you backing up, revisions of each file, will you be using SAN (disk or tape), and what is your tape technology. -----Original Message----- From: wptw63 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 3:18 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: TSM Server on Windows - Does it work? Thanks to everybody who contributed. There's been some really useful information. My understanding is that a single AIX box will scale further and perform better than a Windows machine (indulge me by assuming that we don't stuff 8 processors into the Windows box). However the downside of this is that we should have AIX skills. We don't. So let's scale out (as Microsoft like to say, but then they would; they can sell more licenses...). We currently have over 200 clients, incremental backup fluctuates between 100 & 300 GB per 24 hours. Can anybody give me some guideance on how many boxes, and of what size, I should consider? AIX fans: Please feel free to contribute your spec as well! Once again thanks for all the info. I never expected TSM to be such fun! BTW, apologies for having igniting another UNIX vs Windows firestorm. Pete. ---------------- Powered by telstra.com
