Re: Using Disk in place of tapes for copy pools
John, How many versions do you keep and how does reclamation happen, if it does ? We are interested in setting up something like this and would like to know more of the pros and cons. We've seen prior conversations about issues on reclamation. Any and all information would be appreciated. thanks, mark -Original Message- From: John Underdown [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 8:48 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Using Disk in place of tapes for copy pools Pat, We been using a all disk backuppool for a number of years now. It's grown to 3TB (4 expansion cabinets with 14 73GB drives each and each set to raid 5), we just keep adding disk expansion to server as we need more storage. We use a small LTO library for the copypool. We backup 360 servers (80 to 100 GB total) nightly and growing. The TSM database is 10GB sitting on raid 10 with 15K rpm drives (very fast) , i also defrag the DB monthly. This is a dream setup and works very well, restores run in the blink of a eye. I run the TSM server by myself as a part-time duty. I would suggest just growing your disks storage on your backuppool to at least 1 TB to keep backups and restore running fast, allowing older data to migrate to your existing tape library. Now a days disks have both a performance and price advantage over tape. If you have any other question please let me know. john Synovus Columbus, GA -- Date:Wed, 10 Apr 2002 12:32:20 -0400 From:Patrick J. Kelleher [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Using Disk in place of tapes for copy pools We currently back up 500 GIG a night using an ATL 6000 tape library. Before replacing Tape Library we would like to research the possibility of using Disk in place of tape for all backups. Anyone doing this, especially on a large scale as we have 20 terabytes in Tape Library. --
Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server
Robin, We've been having some very interesting conversations with HP and Tivoli about the application problems. They gone through all of our stuff and would like to compare our kernel parameters with someone else that is running 4.1 on HP 9000 L-Class server. Could we get a copy of /stand/system the output of sysdef and kmtune -l Let me know how we can repay the favor. thanks, mark -Original Message- From: Robin Sharpe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 1:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server Ok Mark, Here is my swlist -l product: (See attached file: swlist)(let me know if you can't get the attachment, I'll insert the text). We haven't had such serious problems (no corruption). 4.1.4.1 has been pretty stable for us... until last week. So far, after the patches this morning, it looks pretty good. I had heard that the earlier mods of 4.1 were buggy... maybe that is at the root of your trouble? We have about 26 unix (HP and Sun) and 50 NT clients. We also have another TSM on an IBM F50 with an ATL P3000, which we are migrating from. We plan to move it to another location after migration. Our L2000 has two 550Mhz procs, and 2GB RAM. Database and disk storage pools are on two HP 2100 arrays... we plan to move the database and logs to the XP512 when it is online. Good Luck Robin
Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server
Robin, Here is a quick update. We've got Tivoli and HP talking. TSM 4.1.5 is a 32-bit application and it runs into an issue with one of the pthreads dying, causing the app to hang. When we went from 4.1.0 to 4.1.5 due to a known bug, the app changed around version 4.1.2 from many processes to one process with many threads. Hopefully Tivoli can get a fix for this very soon. We can let you know what we come up with. I and my group do have concerns about QA testing and the level of commitment for HP platform support. thanks, mark -Original Message- From: Robin Sharpe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 1:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server Ok Mark, Here is my swlist -l product: (See attached file: swlist)(let me know if you can't get the attachment, I'll insert the text). We haven't had such serious problems (no corruption). 4.1.4.1 has been pretty stable for us... until last week. So far, after the patches this morning, it looks pretty good. I had heard that the earlier mods of 4.1 were buggy... maybe that is at the root of your trouble? We have about 26 unix (HP and Sun) and 50 NT clients. We also have another TSM on an IBM F50 with an ATL P3000, which we are migrating from. We plan to move it to another location after migration. Our L2000 has two 550Mhz procs, and 2GB RAM. Database and disk storage pools are on two HP 2100 arrays... we plan to move the database and logs to the XP512 when it is online. Good Luck Robin
Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server
Robin, Great to hear from you! We are backing up 60 UNIX servers and 220 NT/W2K servers with 15TB of EMC and 1.5 TB of NetApp to two L-Class boxes each with 4 440MHz procs, 12 GB RAM and an ATL P6000 w/16 drive tape library each. TSM 3.7.4 was very stable and our only problem was keeping pace with the rapid increase in new servers. When we went to 4.1, bugs started to crop in and caused stability issues. We've had horrible and frustrating experiences with Tivoli support. In 4.1 we ran into a known bug that corrupted the database. We applied all of the patches required by support (getting us up to 4.1.5) and now we are running into a thread errors. One of the threads will crash and bring down the app. Would it be possible to share the output of swlist ? I'm hoping that there may be a patch that you have already installed that we have not. thanks, mark -Original Message- From: Robin Sharpe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:08 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Looking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server Mark, We are running TSM 4.1.4.1 on an L2000-5x, HP-UX 11.00. We have an HP 20/700 library with 10 DLT8000 drives, each on its own SCSI bus. We are in the early stages of a SAN implementation (with HP XP512 disk) and have just added 2 A5158A fiber cards to the L2000. At about the same time we installed them, we noticed erratic hangs on the TSM server, which eventually clear up... but the effect on TSM operations has been pretty bad. Just applied some patches to HP-UX about an hour ago... will let you know if it fixes things. What is your specific problem? What is you environment (server, library, etc.)? Robin Sharpe Berlex Labs Kovacs, Mark Mark.Kovacs@P HARMA.COM To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] cc:(bcc: Robin Sharpe/WA/USR/SHG) 02/11/02 05:15 Subject: PMLooking for sites with TSM 4.X running on HP-UX server Please respond to ADSM: Dist Stor Manager To all: I would like to get in contact with anyone running TSM 4.X on HP-UX 11.00. We have multiple servers and one is experiencing application issues. We have been in continuous contact with TSM support, but find it very frustrating. We believe it may be a combination of patches on both TSM as well as HPUX. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. thanks, mark
Bare Metal Restore Product fro the Kernel Group
TSMers, Does anyone have experience with the Bare Metal Restore product from the Kernel Group ? I've seen their information at http://www.tkg.com/bmr/ and was wondering if anyone else has used it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated ! Thanks, mark
Re: Bare Metal Restore Product fro the Kernel Group
Shawn, He have both UNIX and NT servers running in our shop. We have both NT and HP-UX TSM servers, so it should not be a problem. I would like to get a contact that can give us some good technical insight into the product and how well it works. I was even wondering if you can use it to quickly create a recovery partition, load a basic OS and TSM clients, and then run a normal full TSM recovery. thanks, mark -Original Message- From: Shawn D. King [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 8:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Bare Metal Restore Product fro the Kernel Group Hi Mark We had The Kernel Group come out to our company about a month ago and they were going to do a demonstration of the product, Our shop is mostly NT, but we also are running Novell, and Digital Open VMS and the Kernel Group Software runs on a Unix Platform, If you have a Unix environment the product may work well, but In our environment, there were too many variables that had to be met (ie:the client being restored, the TSM Server, and the BMR Server all needed to be on the same Network) Our environment had 4 virtual Networks, and it took us most of the day the set up the environment for the demo, and in the end, the product did not restore the system, I ended up working that night restoring the machine with the TSM product by itself. As I mentioned, I am a NT shop, and the product is not ready for NT as of yet, they kept telling me that day that they were still developing the product to work with NT, and by early next year it should perform better with NT, In theory the product seems like a god send, you are suppose to be able to just boot up to the BMR Server and you are suppose to be able to just walk away while your restore goes unattended. I am still interested in the product, but I think I am going to wait until next year to give the developers of BMR some time to work out the kinks that are still in the system. If you are interested a demo of the product I can give you a contact name, I know that they will be more then willing to come out to your site and do a demo of the product for you. Regards Shawn D. King Data Protection Manager International Data Group 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 (508) 935-4391 "Kovacs, Mark" [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 12/12/2000 07:46:17 AM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc:(bcc: Shawn King/IDGCORP/IDG) Subject: Bare Metal Restore Product fro the Kernel Group TSMers, Does anyone have experience with the Bare Metal Restore product from the Kernel Group ? I've seen their information at http://www.tkg.com/bmr/ and was wondering if anyone else has used it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated ! Thanks, mark
Re: Would you buy TSM again.
Lynn, We are a HP shop with 24 large HP-UX servers and 130 NT servers (90% HP) backing up 7 TB via TSM. We have been running the TSM server on HP-UX with ATL tape libraries for almost three years now ! We had one major problem with an upgrade between TSM, ATL and HP... It turned out to be a nasty problem with the HP drivers for DTL7000s, while HP technical support was pathetic, ATL and IBM were great! -Original Message- From: Sattler, Lynn [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2000 10:11 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Would you buy TSM again. We are reconsidering our backup software. We are a pretty large unix shop (5 Terrabytes to backup nightly) and are using some HP Omniback and a lot of Veritas Netbackup. Mostly HP-UX. We have a large Lotus Notes Rel 5 implementation on AIX (600 gig on its way to 1.2 Terrabytes). We are studying robot technology and SAN's. Tivoli is selling and Netbackup is trying to stay in the shop. How good do you rate TSM on a scale of 1 to 10. (10 being best). [Kovacs, Mark] [Kovacs, Mark] 9 nothing is a ten, but I've used most all of them at one time or another in the past. Would you definately buy it again, or would you shop around. [Kovacs, Mark] Buy again. We had a recent issue with a very slow NT restore of 100+ GB and are looking into some fixes to the overall configuration. My gut feeling is that everybody has some complaints with their backup solution. [Kovacs, Mark] No major complaints, but here are some observations: 1. The person administrating TSM has to be trained on TSM. There is a company out in Colorado Springs that does a fantastic job (much better than you know who) 2. You must really spend some upfront time and plan for the entire implementation. Really look at your data and your servers and really understand your nightly incrementals. I would recommend bringing in IBM Global Services (their TSM demi-gods in particular) in for the design and initial setup. We went initially with some IBM Business Partners and latter had others in for a system health/reality check. My Jr. UNIX Admin knew ten times as much about TSM as their "expert". TSM is not a canned super TAR or FBACKUP, but a much more complex and capable solution. 3. Require (sometimes at gun point) your UX and NT admins to perform recovery tests. Hint, use Ignite on HP-UX to rebuild the box, make sure TSM is installed on VG00, in its default directories. Our NT Admins went through restores following the Red Book and then experimented with their own ideas. They came up with some nice alternatives that proved to really kick start the restores into high gear! We also setup a small NT server and ATL tape library that the UX and NT Admins use for testing, training and expermenting (recently Win2K). It made a world of difference getting their emotional buy-in and taking ownership on TSM. 4. Be very proactive on your business growth. Our servers are growing 40-50% a year for three years running and disk storage, doubling to tripling every year (My EMC Sales Rep loves me!) Our very slow NT restore was due to fragmentation across too many tapes (320 to be exact) and took 4 days Yikes! 5. Remember, it is still only tape and will only run at the maximum speed you can get out of tapes. For true, super fast DR, look into some real-time replication (SRDF for EMCs). Also take a hard look at storing business critical data on a high availability solution (we use both EMC and NetApps). Mark Kovacs Purdue Pharma Stamford, CT. Lynn Sattler Dana Corp Toledo Oh [EMAIL PROTECTED]
