Hello, I have questions about server sizing and scaling. I'm planning to transition from Networker to TSM a client pool of around 300 clients, with the last full backup being about 7TB and almost 200M files. The TSM server platform will be RHEL Linux.
I realize putting all of that into one TSM database is going to make it large and unwieldy. I'm just not sure how best to partition it in my environment and use the resources available to me. (Or what resources to ask for if the addition of X will make a much easier TSM configuration.) For database and storage pools, I will have a multiple TB SAN allocation I can divide between instances. I have one 60 slot HP MSL6060 library (SCSI), with two LTO-3 SCSI drives. There is also an external SCSI LTO-3 drive. My understanding of a shared SCSI library indicates that the library is SCSI-attached to a server, but drive allocation is done via SAN connections or via SCSI drives that are directly attached to the different instances. (Meaning the directly attached SCSI drives are not sharable.) Is that true, at least as far as shared libraries go? The data doesn't actually go through the library master to a directly connected drive, does it? If not, and I still wanted to use sharing, I could give each instance a dedicated drive - but since two drives seems like the minimum for TSM tape operations, I don't really think it's wise to split them. (However, if the 'best' solution would be to add two more drives to max out the library, I can look into doing that.) If the drives need to be defined just on one server, it looks like server-to-server device classes and virtual volumes are the only solution. I don't really like the complexity of one instance storing anothers' copy pools inside of an archive pool just to use tape, but it looks like things are heading that way. Other than the obvious hardware cost savings, I don't really see the advantage of multiple instances on the same hardware. (I haven't decided yet if we would use one beefy server or two medium servers.) If you load up multiple instances on the same server, do you give them different IP interfaces to make distinguishing between them in client configs and administration tools easier? Tape access-wise, is there a hardware advantage putting multiple instances on the same system? Any recommendations on any of this? Your help is appreciated. Dave