On May 9,  2:49pm, John Howard wrote:
> Subject: ADSM and SAP
> Queries to the crowd:
> 1. ADSM doesn't appear to be good at central logging of events, etc., nor at
> centralized management of servers.  We are building an environment of  3 SP2
> towers, 4 or 5 eight-way R30 systems, and various Sun and HP systems to
support
> SAP and related products.  To minimize our backup time, we have to run
multiple
> servers and 3494 robotic systems.  A BIG issue is the management of the
backups
> for this environment as a whole, and not as many separate ADSM server
> environments.  IBM folks tell me that this will be addressed in 1997, but
we're
> going "live" in July 1996.   We have been looking closely at products from
> Software Clearing House (affiliated with Storage Technology) that fulfills
this
> need, but has serious problems with SAP's approved backup plan.  Does any one
> of you have any suggestions or know of any helpful documention that may help
us
> make ADMS "be all that it can be" in this environment?
>
> 2. ADSM seems to be constrained in it's ability to keep up with the input
> capacity of 3590 tape systems.  For example, IBM reps have mentioned a rule
of
> thumb to expect (even with SSA disk drives) about a 3 to 1 throughput
> capability of the 3590 over the disk drive during the backup.  Other backup
> products claim to overcome this by multiplexing multiple, parallel I/O
streams
> from multiple disk drives (or tablespaces) to a single tape drive.  Has any
of
> you any experience with this or comments you'd like to share?
>
> Thanks,
>      John Howard
>-- End of excerpt from John Howard

John
HAve you talked to the SAP folks about the BACKINT interface to ADSM for
backups?  Basically, SAP does the online or offline DB backup to a file, then
BACKINT invokes ADSM to archive that file (that is the db and logs).  Within
BACKINT, there is the ability to specify multiple processes.... so ADSM will
write data to 2,3,4 etc tape drives at once for one database.  We use this on a
single SP2 with 4 different databases.  Each database kicks off at a different
time, and the BACKINT is setup to use two tape drives at once.  So each db
backup ends up on 2 or 4 tapes, depending on size.  They all finish relatively
quickly.  Our tape robotics are not as robust or fast as yours, but it works.
(7331, 8 mm tapes library,with 2 drives)