Legato 6.1.3 on Solaris 8 (master + 2 SN):
        I've been working on various and sundry means to make our
hardware architecture stretch to meet our backup and recovery needs.
One of the primary issues we have is a weak brain.  In other words, we
do enough work at any given time slice that the master NSRD process is
maxing out an entire single 400MHz processor on a 4x400 SUN e450.
Meanwhile, the other 3 cpus are doing practically nothing.  Our storage
nodes still seem to have room to grow as I/O-data movers, but each extra
bit sent to a node increases the overhead on the master and results in
further queuing of jobs waiting to be processed by the maxed out NSRD
job.  
        We are investigating moving to a new Sun server master
(v280/480) with 2x950MHz, but if I can take advantage of the 3
underutilized cpus, then we may not need to spend the dollars.  So in
that vein, does anyone know of any wrappers/kernel mods/etc that allow
you to present a single "virtual" cpu to the process that is back-ended
by multi thread cpu process?  

        My thought are:  if I have a wrapper (MyWrap) that accepts cpu
calls and translates them into a multi-threaded call to all 4 CPUs, then
I could up my overall cpu load towards the 100% mark.  Even if I lost
50% to overhead, I'd still have an effective doubling of process
capabilities for the single process.  FYI, I'm thinking the preference
would be towards a "nohup" style of wrapper.  I.E. execution would be
"MyWrap -$switches -PID $PID" or "MyWrap -$switches nsrd &"  
        There's no reason I could think of that you couldn't make it
into some form of kernel mod or something (to build that 'single' cpu
box on multiple cpus to provide single-function server).  It's not
something that everybody would want (why waste a perfectly good
multi-proc box like that?) but I'd take sharing 4-as-1 CPU with the
whole system versus where I am today maxing out 1 and leaving the other
3 out in the cold.

        Thank you all for your time and attention to my flight of fancy.
If anyone has any information concerning an actual product that meets
these basic requirements, I would LOVE to hear about it.  Thank you
again.

                  --Ted G. Reed II, Engineering Storage Services   
                     Pager: (888)510-4934   Phone: (913)794-7826

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