We will be using a IBM Shark disk subsystem for our TSM db and
staging pools.  I'm interested in advise from others who use a Shark
for these purposes on how you have it setup.

1) My first thought for the tsm db, is to allocate small luns on each
raid set, combine them into one AIX volume group.  This would allow
me to get all disks in the Shark involved in db accesses.  But, it
would put the db on the same raidsets as the staging pools which I
think would be bad.

2)  My second thought, is to use a couple raidsets for the db with no
staging pools on them.  This basically dedicates them to the db.
This sounds like a better idea.

3)  For staging pools, I'm planning to spread the pool files on
different raidsets/luns.  I know that TSM allocates a thread per pool
file, so I was going to keep the individual files down to around 4gb.
I'll have several hundred gigs os staging pool.

4)  The Shark manual indicates that you can create an AIX striped
filesystem across Shark luns, and that this is good.  Is anyone doing
this?  Logically this creates a raid 0 (striped) filesystem across
raid 5 luns.  It seems that Shark read-ahead logic would get messed
up.

5)  Even though the Shark is a raid system, are you still using TSM
db and/or log mirroring?




Thanks

Rick