Hi Nick 1) We only carve out 1 vtape lib per 7650 - we then share that library with 2-4 TSM instances on one AIX server, some installations will have two 7650's to a aix p6 650.
2) 128 Drives was just a number - We get close 60-80 Drives as our DB backups larger than 2gig goes to vtl so we get quite a few mounts 3) We share one and sometimes two 7650's with one vtl defined per physical hosts, then have 2-4 instances share the 1-2 vtls so one instance is a LM too. We haven't done stg agents in a while, with us we can't seem to scale the tsm instance big enough (v 5.5 - just starting to get into v6.x where we will go dowon to one TSM instance per host os.) Seems that after 15TB ingestion per instance we need to turn up a new instance cant get all the work done in a day. I 'm hoping we can move toward more of a NFS model, I know EMC's DD has it but not being able to get a DD in a gateway version doesn't alow us to leverage our primary disk vendor for a cheaper for a good disk price. I imagine 6PB of DD would be a lot more than 6PB of our current disk technology. The whole tape path management can be a pain, we do have a script that will delete define etc, but even then it would just seem cleaner to go sequential file devclass on NFS. Maybe when the IBM 7650 goes NFS we can leverage that but we'll see. We alomost got our DBA's on to a NFS target even without TSM but they too were afraid of NFS and having to manage their own backup disk space. arrggg Richard, I like youre layout of pro's and cons, we've seen NFS issues on our AIX backup servers for 2ndcopy scripts etc and it can be painful. We were in a spot where we lost a 7650 and slid a SUn 7410 NAS device in for a week or two it ownly had a couple 1gig interfaces so it was slow but wrked well. We were even thinking that we'd test some other NAS devices for a NFS target instead of a "Backup Appliance" but that POC is on hold due to too much day to day wrk. Charles -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Nick Laflamme Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:11 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] RMAN direct to NFS This is more about VTLs than TSM, but I have a couple of questions, influenced by my shop's experience with VTLs. 1) When you say "40 VTLs," I presume that's on far fewer frames, that you're using several virtual libraries on each ProtecTier or whatever you're using? 2) I see that as 128 tape drives per library. Do you ever use that many, or is this just a "because we could" situation? (We use 48 per library, and that may be overkill, but we're on EMC hardware, not IBM, so the performance curves may be different.) 3) Do I read 1) and 4) to mean that you're sharing VTLs among TSM servers? Why, man, why? Can't you give each TSM server its own VTL and be done with it? Or are you counting storage agents as TSM instances? I don't know if we'd have gone with VTLs if we were architecting this from scratch, but as we went from tape-based to virtual technology, the VTL interfaces made the transition logically simpler, and it appeased the one team member who has an irrational hatred of NFS. We're now under pressure to adopt a new reference architecture that is NFS based, not VTL based. I'm skeptical about that will work, but because we're changing everything except the fact that we're still a TSM shop, if it doesn't go well, everyone will have a chance to blame someone else for any problems. Now that I think about it, I have no idea how many paths we have defined to all of our VTLs on all of our DataDomains. It might be 10,000 paths ultimately, but when you define them a few hundred at a time, or fewer, it's not so overwhelming! Nick On Jul 10, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Hart, Charles A wrote: > The IBM one, the reason I said overhead and complexity > > 1) We have 40 VTL's for > 2) 5120 Configured Vtape Drives > 3) More than 10,000 TSM Tape Drive Paths > 4) 100 TSM Instances that share all the above > > It would "seem" that if we used a VTL that has NFS we would still have > 40 Devices but not he 15K objets to manage (tape Drives and paths) > > Regards, > > Charles This e-mail, including attachments, may include confidential and/or proprietary information, and may be used only by the person or entity to which it is addressed. If the reader of this e-mail is not the intended recipient or his or her authorized agent, the reader is hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by replying to this message and delete this e-mail immediately.