Following application of ML07 and system firmware to AIX on one
of our TSM backup servers, the time taken for backups of our
large TSM clients to run has more than doubled.

It could be a co-incidence but nothing else has changed in the
TSM environment and there are no obvious network problems.
Another backup server with the same hardware (IBM,7029-6C3/ 2 GB memory)
doesn't appear to be affected in the same way following ML07
although it does have a much smaller workload and database and uses
IBM internal disks rather than external RAID units.

Comparing /etc/tunables/lastboot before and after shows no
significant changes as far as I can tell.

Throughput as shown by 'Aggregate data transfer rate' has dropped from
1,065.36 KB/sec to 365.55 KB/sec in one case and other clients show
similar figures. The 'Network data transfer rate' has increased.

Backups are done to a disk storage pool on an external scsi
attached RAID unit. No other activity such as reclaims or migrations
are taking place at the time of the backups.

Has anyone seen anything similar or can suggest what the problem
might be ?

Running AIX 5.2 with server 5.2.3.0, TSM clients ( mainly ) 5.2.0.0.
TSM database size 89 GB.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
 Steven Bridge     Systems Group, Information Systems, EISD
                          University College London