Zoltan Forray/AC/VCU wrote:

Crazy project time...........

I have been asked to research the
feasability/probability/scaleability/sizing of TSM to possibly handle
backing up thousands (actually close to 20,000 or more) desktops!

Anybody have experience doing very, very large scale backups of so many
nodes?   Don't expect much in storage occupancy since we would exclude
things like MP3, etc.  It would just be the ##### of files/database size
(sounds like this would have to wait for V6 since DB2 should scale much
better).

Does anyone run their TSM servers, open?   Trying to
administer/register/monitor this many clients would be a nightmare.

They are talking about budgeting close to $1M, which would include more
bodies as well as the equipment/software!

Well, you are an experienced TSM admin, so I guess you know the drill,
about 500 bytes for each version of each file. Get a rough estimate of
the number of files. The number of nodes you mention is an issue, even
if each stores just a few files (they won't I guess).

You'll need lots of TSM instances, and lots of db spindles. Really,
there is a use for 15k RPM 72 GB  (or even 36 GB) disks in raid1, and
you just found one.

In my experience, there are a few things to make life easier, Gresham
EDT is one of them, with autolabeling and decent library sharing, you
really gain over TSM's native library sharing. On the plus-side, you are
limited to ACSLS libraries, which you'll probably need anyway for larger
amounts of data (how many options are there, really? ;-) ).

--

Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post