On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:57:44AM -0500, Sergio Fuentes wrote:
> Any thoughts from anyone running a TSM server on Solaris?

I recently installed TSM 5.5.1 server code on a Sun X4540
("Thumper 2") with 2 x 2.3GHz quad-core Opterons, 32GB RAM, 48 x
1TB 7200RPM internal SATA disks, 3 PCIe slots, and Solaris 10
x86 Update 5.  It has only one dual-port 2Gbps FC-AL PCIe HBA
driving 4 Sun T10000B tape drives.  This was a development
server that I decided to test as a TSM server, otherwise I would
have preferred a dual-port 4Gbps HBA.  But so far it has
performed fine.

The one catch is that TSM 5.5.1 does not support ZFS volumes
(zvols) as raw random access storage pools.  So I used ZFS to
create a zpool of striped mirrors, created different ZFS file
systems (with compression enabled) in place of random access
disk storage pools, and then defined a bunch of 50GB TSM
sequential volumes in each one.  So basically, clients are
writing to devtype FILE instead of DISK when they push data to
the server.

Like many folks have said, choose the OS you best support.  I
prefer Solaris, so that's what I'm using.  RHEL would have been
the next choice.  I'm not saying the setup I'm using is the
fastest out there, but it is adequate for our needs right now.

--
Lance Nakata                   SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Scientific Computing and       2575 Sand Hill Road, MS 97
  Computing Services (SCCS)    Menlo Park, CA 94025
LNakata AT slac.stanford DOT edu      http://www.slac.stanford.edu/