> >3) Are the current servers colocated, or distributed? SMB > and SMB over > >IP are fairly bandwidth intensive, and IPX over IP is *very* chatty. > >This will have an significant impact on your WAN if the > servers are not > >colocated today. > > The 4 servers I've mentioned are colocated with the 750 > desktops, but if > this project is successful we will want to expand to some of > our remote > sites.
Given that bandwidth still is often cheaper than servers, this may not be a problem. Still, you should investigate what increasing the BW to the outlying sites would be, early on. Raw SMB will probably encourage you to look at something more sophisticated. > >4) Do you already have a mainframe hosted backup solution > such as FDR or > >TSM? If not, can you afford to dedicate a tape drive to the LPAR? > > We have TSM on AIX for Netware file backups which I assume we > can use for > Linux/Samba file backups. However I'm concerned about all that backup > traffic going through the network and we'll be considering > alternatives. We > also plan to backup the Linux/Samba DASD with our OS/390 3390 > volume dumps > so we have a fast DR capability for file/print. While the TSM solution may work, you should be aware that Tivoli's support for 390-based (of any flavor) has been disappointing. I'm sure others can comment on this at length, but keep it in mind. Also, keep in mind that for the OS/390 backup solution to work reliably, the Samba instances must be completely down during the backup if you want consistent, usable dumps.
