What platform are you planning to run TSM v6.3 Server on?

[jharris]

As this poll ( http://adsm.org/forum/showthread.php?12365 ) is now four years old and TSM v6.3 now drops supports for native zOS and 32 bit operating systems, I'd like to hear from those planning to upgrade to TSM v6.3 or have already upgraded as to what TSM server platform they are going to use.
We are looking at upgrading TSM 5.5 from Win64 and seriously want to deploy TSM v6.3 on AIX, but are getting a big management push to invest more infrastructure onto our Z-Linux infrastructure.

[jharris]

Quite a few votes, not much discussion though... I'm interested in also knowing whether the size of your organisation determins your choice ... ie are most of you coming from larger organisations > 1000 node registrations, medium with 100 to 1000 node registrations or small < 100 node registrations.

We're on Windows with 2000 node registrations and still think AIX on System P would be the best choice for scalability of TSM, but Windows does make a strong case with the initial purchase cost. It also can be a case of the 'Devil you know', considering we have no AIX supported applications running here at the moment.

[drivechip]

I would not go for AIX as long you have no skills. I think TSM doesn't scale on Windows worse. Today X64 Intel Servers have a good performance and allows to install multiple TSM instances on the same server.

There is also a TSM licensing point of view where AIX on pSeries might be better depending on your licensing model.

[moon-buddy]

I had the benefit of working on most platforms: AIX, Linux, UNIX (Solaris), OS2, Windows, Mainframe and Novell. Since there has never been a TSM server for OS2 and Novell, I would not know how TSM would have performed on these two environments.

Putting this aside and all things equal (money to spend, backup demand exist, etc), I would really run TSM on AIX in a heartbeat - so stable and very easy to maintain. The last would be Windows - not that it is the least stable but the so many patches that you need to apply and reboot the server. This becomes so annoying. And there are so many memory leaks.

[rowl]

Just in the final phases of upgrading an environment from TSM 5.5 to TSM 6.3. We had a mix of AIX and RH Linux, now we are using only SuSE Linux. While several of us would prefer to use AIX, that platform is being phased out in our environment. So our choices were Windows or Linux. Given those options Linux was the natural choice. Not that Windows is bad, but for infrastructure like backup I don't want a platform that needs reboots for patches every couple weeks.

A couple years back we eliminated physical tape from the environment, and with this project we eliminated virtual tape as well. Now backups are going directly to Data Domain storage over nfs connected with 10Gb Ethernet. So far, we are very happy with this configuration.

-Rowl

[KB]

I had the benefit of working on most platforms: AIX, Linux, UNIX (Solaris), OS2, Windows, Mainframe and Novell. Since there has never been a TSM server for OS2 and Novell, I would not know how TSM would have performed on these two environments.

Putting this aside and all things equal (money to spend, backup demand exist, etc), I would really run TSM on AIX in a heartbeat - so stable and very easy to maintain. The last would be Windows - not that it is the least stable but the so many patches that you need to apply and reboot the server. This becomes so annoying. And there are so many memory leaks.

I started with ADSM on OS/2, server. It was very good to me.

[mikeymac]

Our Engineering team is looking at migrating our TSM servers from AIX to Windows (for very reasonable cost considerations). Besides the issue that others have raised with the need for frequent reboots, I'm concerned about Windows' poor device management. On the up-side, my team doesn't have "root" access to any of our AIX instances, but we do have Administrator access to every Windows server instance. So it'll be nice to have more control over the environment.

[moon-buddy]

I started with ADSM on OS/2, server. It was very good to me.

I did not know that TSM did run on OS/2 - now if you guys will resurrect OS/2, I would galdly run TSM on it!