David,

Here is the list of the things to check:

(1) make sure hardware compression is enabled on your tape drives
(2) make sure TSM does NOT compress data
(3) Oracle server should have enough CPU power to push data, especially if
MTU size is set to 1500 - monitor CPU usage during backups
(4) as for TSM TCPIP settings, TCPWINDOWSIZE (both on the TSM Server and for
TSM API set to 128KB and TCPBUFFSIZE (client, dsm.sys) set to 32KB should be
close to perfect
(5) increase TXNBYTELIMIT (this is BA/API option, mine is set to 100MB, you
might consider increasing it even more)
(6) utilize TSM capability to write to 'null device class' (there is a brief
info about this on ITSM support page) to identify bottlenecks

We were able to achieve 36MB/s throughput per stream backing up to IBM LTO 1
(though we backup DB2, not Oracle, but it does not matter here).

Regards,
Sergey

-----Original Message-----
From: David Nicholson [mailto:David_R_Nicholson AT WHIRLPOOL DOT COM]
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 10:27 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Need to optimize LARGE Oracle DB backup


Hi List,

        I have a 700GB Oracle DB to backup every day. It's a 4.3 AIX
box...soooo LAN Free not an option for my TSM 5.2.2 server. I have
dedicated GB nic's on both the TSM client and TSM server. The network
between them is not over utilized. I am backing up directly to FC LTO II
drives.  Can anyone give me some strategy suggestions on how to get this
backed up as quickly as possible.  Suggestions for performing multiple
thread backups or maybe some TCPIP client options that can be tuned or
anything else you could suggest would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Dave Nicholson
Whirlpool Corporation