EMC Disk Library to Data Domain 890

[donlab]

Currently our environment consists of a TSM 5.5 server with an EMC Disk Library VTL as its primary storage pool and a TS3500 as the copy pool. We purchased a DD890 VTL to replace the EMC Disk Library to take advantage of dedup. We will go from a two engine VTL (EMC disk library) with stg pools split up across both engines to a single engine VTL (DD 890). My questions are...

The primary pools are broken up by platform. For example a VTLengineA_AIX and a VTLengineB_AIX then a VTLengineA_Wintel and VTLengineB_Wintel etc... Can I consolidate the AIX and Wintel pools on the DD? for example create a DD_AIX pool that consolidates VTLengineA_AIX and a VTLengineB_AIX. As you can imagine its a headache to have your pools split across two engines and manage how quickly or slowly the pools fill up. Even better can I just use one giant pool and eliminate carving up the DD into small pools by platform? Is there a dedup or performance benefit by carving up the DD pool?

[chad_small]

On our Data Domains we use just one pool for all our standard backup data and another for TDP data. I am using NFS for non TDP data and VTL for TDP's. Since the DD deduplicates quite well (I'm getting 6x compression) I have not had to worry about space and the NFS option is actually a lot easier to use than VTL since I don't have to define anything other than the file system location(s) to the FILE device class. Check out Data Domain's TSM Best Practices document. Makes for some interesting ideas.