Hi, without going into SANergy per se, I would suggest to you to think very carefully what problem you want to solve by using any SAN-shared filesystem. I've seen GPFS and CXFS (SGI) being used in HPC quite successfully, but only in very limited, high performance situations. These filesystems are well established in those applications and only in those applications for a reason.
As for SANergy, I've been testing with it a long time ago. The way it worked at that time (LD_PRELOAD) was not the most charming solution, not did it work with all applications (apachectl would crash with the LD_PRELOAD set). Of course, SANergy is certified with TSM, so as long as you just use TSM with the LD_PRLOAD set, you can always blame IBM ;-) IMNSHO, in a TSM application, LAN-free is usually not what you want, and if you do, you probably need LAN-free to tape rather then LAN-free to disk (where SANergy comes into play). As for a blade to host a TSM server, usually a blade has insufficient i/o capabilities to be a mid- range or high-end TSM server. There are just to few i/o capabilities. AIX is (again in my not so humble opinion) the most robust OS there is when it comes to housing TSM. You can push AIX much further in terms of i/o load than any other OS, and I've found it to be quite maintenance-free. A low-end pSeries system will not cost the world, not even compared to a blade.... Having your TSM environment completely independent of your production environment is always a good idea. On 26 mei 2009, at 19:22, Gill, Geoffrey L. wrote:
Is anyone out there using SANergy in their environment? With the changes we're going through it looks like the environment, wherever it's going to be housed, is going to allow changes. I'm looking for information from anyone who is using TSM in a SAN environment instead of a segregated backup network but would like to hear arguments for or against either. I'm interested in which platform you chose, why, what sort of challenges you've had and the stability of your environment. I'm being steered towards Linux but would prefer to stick with AIX. The question is what sort of horsepower I'll need for either. The folks here want me to use an HP blade BL460c that can house lots of memory and max 8 Cores. Only 3 slots available for add-on cards, and a 10Ge port, unfortunately I have not found anything that explains the environment well enough to figure out if this will suffice. If it turns out the size of the blade allows us to build the proper size environment then I think I can convince them to purchase a similar IBM box for the same cost so I can stay with AIX. If anyone has worked with both and can give me good arguments 'for' AIX that would also be helpful. I can bring up a test environment now and move a couple of tape drives to it along with a few TB of disk space on the SAN for disk storage pools. If this works out well I'd probably move 150-200 nodes to it for backups. Hopefully some of you have something similar already in place which will provide the necessary info to help in making a good decision moving forward. Thanks for any advice you can lend. Geoff Gill TSM Administrator PeopleSoft Sr. Systems Administrator SAIC M/S-B1P (858)826-4062 (office) (858)412-9883 (blackberry) Email: geoffrey.l.g...@saic.com
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