On Jul 17, 2008, at 20:33 , Sean English wrote:

Just wanted to get feedback on what others are doing in terms of
their TSM
environments where library sharing, IBM libraries, and drives are
involved.  We have the following setup in one of our major
datacenters:

14 (with growth projected up to 19 or 20) TSM instances running on
p570's
with AIX 5.3 and TSM server 5.4.3.0.
1 library manager managing all these library clients. LM has 78 drives
connected to it (72 in one 3584 libary and 6 in a long term data
retention
3584 library)
LM also, currently, has 2100+ path statements representing all the
current
library clients and storage agents. We also have the potential of
adding
200 more storage agents to this library framework (moving from 9940 to
3592).
We backed up ~50 TBs a day.
Just wanted to see what others were doing in similar environments.

I wouldn't zone all drives to all servers and lanfree clients, 18-26
drives zoned to a server or client gives you a high enough probability
that at the appropriate time a drive is available. This will reduce
the number of paths to maintain and the complexity of the zone db.

I guess your situation is the one situation that you want to look into
a vtl or other tape virtualisation solution, so you don't have to buy
a tape drive for each server, client and whatever.

Question is, do you really need all those lanfree clients, or is it
cheaper and to invest in a bit of 10 GE network kit and use the LAN
and have TSM do what it's good at: storage hierarchies.

Thanks,
Sean

--
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622