Hi,
We have implemented TSM on a fastt700. What I would suggest you do is get
the system installed and do some real world performance testing to validate
any configuration you are looking at. This is approximately what we have
done:
2 Member Raid 1 for system disk (AIX 5.2 can boot from the SAN)
2 Member Raid 1 for logs
5 Member Raid 5 for DB
9 Member Raid 5 for Disk Pool
9 Member Raid 5 for Disk Pool
Not all of the space is completely allocated to the filesystems here, but it
give you the picture. We did quite a bit of testing to make sure that the
Raid 5 for the disk pools would not slow us down. During our testing we
were able to write to these disks (bot simultaneously) at 50MB/s each. This
was plenty of validation for me that the disk configuration could pretty
much handle whatever we threw at it. So far (we have been live for 4 months
and are ratcheting up the number of systems we back up) we are doing
extremely well. The system backs up over 250GB/night (which isn't a lot,
but it is increasingly rapidly). This is spread across approximately two
hours (to disk) then another two hours or so to tape (IBM 3584 Lib with 8/FC
attached LTO1's). There is a lot of room to grow with that as the backup to
tape is currently limited by fact that of the 250GB approximately 150GB
comes from a single host (so when you do the stgpool backup it can't
parallelize beyond a certain point).
One caution however is to be sure and implement zoning today. Don't wait to
implement this until you need to. We have waited a while on our Compaq SAN
equipment and are having to retro the zoning in. Also
As to the question about mirrored database volumes, I cannot say one way or
another. I have seen posts that suggest this is a problem. I have also
worked with databases for quite a while (oracle, sybase and mssql) and never
seen this issue with them. So either whatever flavor of database IBM uses
is susceptible to this issue or it was more of a problem with older
hardware. I have currently not setup this system to mirror the database
volumes in software. The issue with the corruption of the database volume
was not correctable with hardware raid.
Other info:
System: 7026-M80 (8 500MHZ CPU's, 8GB RAM)
SAN: IBM rebranded 2Gb brocade switches
TSM Version: 5.2.0.1
Michael Wheelock
Integris Health of Oklahoma
-----Original Message-----
From: Leonard Lauria [mailto:leonard AT UKY DOT EDU]
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 7:53 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: opinions on disk partitioning
I would like to get opinions on disk configurations for a new platform.
I am installing my TSM server on an aix platform, with FASTT700 disk.
The FASTT700 has (28) 73 GB, 15K disks, of which 23 are available for this
application.
I am considering the following 2 setups, but please feel free to make other
suggestions!
1) 12 drives for the TSM DB, raid 10. I only need 100 GB, plus room to
grow,
perhaps double, so this wastes a lot of space, but I get needed
spindles.
Remaining 11 drives would be Raid 5, and exported as a single LUN
which would
have 4 logical volumes for:
570 GB disk pool
200 GB disk pool
20 GB disk pool
13 GB TSM log
2) 8 drives for the TSM DB, raid 5. I only need 100 GB, plus room to grow,
perhaps double, so this is less space, but fewer spindles and no
mirror.
Remaining 15 drives would be Raid 5, and exported as a single LUN
which would
have 4 logical volumes for:
500 GB disk pool
500 GB disk pool
82 GB disk pool
13 GB TSM log
#2 gives me more spindles for the disk pools, by using only raid5 for the
database partitions.
Another concern is having the disk pools compete with each other on the same
disks. Would it be better to have fewer spindles per disk pools, but have
disk pools seperate from each other, or all the disk pools spread over the
same larger number of spindles?
Also, I have had a lot of conflicting information regarding TSM doing
mirrors of the DB and LOG versus letting the FASTT hardware do raid
protection. It seems the hardware implementation would be faster, and just
as safe, as letting TSM do mirrors...not to mention allowing me to spread
things out a bit more.
Any opinions on my options?
Thanks!
leonard
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