I had an odd situation occur involving formatting disk storage volumes on
a Linux server.

In the past, when creating and formatting storage pool volumes, a 300GB
volume would normally take an hour or more. I could watch the space being
allocated, piece-by-piece until it reached 300GB and then wait for the
formatting to complete. This process was usually so resource intensive
(never understood why???) doing something like an LS would take many
seconds to respond.

Yesterday, I had a need to create new volumes on a recently rebuilt server
- RH Linux 5.6 and TSM server 6.2.3.0.

Imagine my surprise when a 300GB volume was created in 2-seconds!
Furthermore, I create 9-300GB volumes as fast as I could enter the
commands!

I thought for sure there was some kind of problem but all the error logs I
checked were clean.  I figured if I started using them they would start
registering errors but nothing happened!  Everything seems to be working
just fine.

So, what gives?

Is there some dramatic change in 6.2.3.0 (this is my first server upgraded
to this level) effecting the behavior of creating disk storage pool
volumes?  It can't be the hardware since this is a 3+ year old machine.  I
have newer, bigger, beefier, faster servers that still take a long time to
format storage volumes?


Zoltan Forray
TSM Software & Hardware Administrator
Virginia Commonwealth University
UCC/Office of Technology Services
zforray AT vcu DOT edu - 804-828-4807
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