ADSM-L

Re: [ADSM-L] TSM Dedup stgpool target

2013-11-14 14:15:42
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM Dedup stgpool target
From: "Colwell, William F." <bcolwell AT DRAPER DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 19:13:48 +0000
Hi Sergio,

I faced the same questions 3 years ago and settled on the products from Nexsan 
(now owned by Imation) for
massive bulk storage.

You can get a 4u 60 drive head unit with 4TB sata disks (the E60 model), and 
later attach 2 60 drive expansion 
units to it (the E60X model).

I have 3 head units now, not with the configuration above because they are 
older.

1 unit is direct attached with fiber and the other 2 are san attached.  I am 
planning to convert the
direct unit to san attached to facilitate a processor upgrade.

There are 2 server instances on the processor sharing the filesystems.  The OS 
is Linux rhel 5.

All volumes are scratch allocated. 

The backups first land on non raid 15k 600GB disks in an Infortrend device.  
The copypooling is done from there
and also the identify processing.  Then they are migrated to the Nexsan based 
storagepools.

There is also a tape library.  Really big files are excluded from dedup via the 
stgpool MAXSIZE parameter and
land on a separate pool on the Nexsan storage which then migrates to tape.

Hope this helps,

Bill Colwell
Draper Lab

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Sergio O. Fuentes
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 10:32 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: TSM Dedup stgpool target

In an earlier thread, I polled this group on whether people recommend going 
with an array-based dedup solution or doing a TSM dedup solution.  Well, the 
answers came back mixed, obviously with an 'It depends'-type clause.

So, moving on...  assuming that I'm using TSM dedup, what sort of target arrays 
are people putting behind their TSM servers.   Assume here, also, that you'll 
be having multiple TSM servers,  another backup product, *coughveeam and 
potentially having to do backup stgpools on the dedup stgpools.  I ask because 
I've been barking up the mid-tier storage array market as our potential disk 
based backup target simply because of the combination of cost, performance, and 
scalability.  I'd prefer something that is dense I.e. more capacity less 
footprint and can scale up to 400TB.  It seems like vendors get disappointed 
when you're asking for a 400TB array with just SATA disk simply for backup 
targets.  None of that fancy array intelligence like auto-tiering, large 
caches, replication, dedup, etc.. is required.

Is there another storage market I should be looking at, I.e. really dumb raid 
arrays, direct attached, NAS, etc...

Any feedback is appreciated, even the 'it depends'-type.

Thanks!
Sergio

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