Building blocks is a good approach. When I said that NT is your bottleneck,
my big point is scalability. Building block is a way of growing your
capacity in linear way.

However, you will have a harder management of your ADSM servers (instead
of a single box). By the other hand, ADSM lets you use management profiles
and a configuration server, that might help.

By the way, how will you make tape storage ? A big library on a single box
or smaller ones on every block ? You could have a "better" box to be your
tape storage server and use SERVER class pools to migrate data.

Anyway, check prices. Are many boxes cheaper than a bigger one with
better scalability ? Consider management costs, too.

best regards,
Rodrigo

>We used the building block approach. Designing a "balanced" (we hope!)
>system of a certain size. Each of these blocks can back up about 20 to 30
>clients with a total disk usage of about 2 TBytes (we hope!). When we have
>more clients to back up, then we add another building block - which includ
>a new NT server, memory, disk cache, tape library etc.....
>This spreads the load, requires less ADSM tuning knowledge, and allows eas
>to understand expansion in the future.
>Cheers, Chris
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Rodrigo Cordovil Gazzaneo [mailto:rgazzaneo AT INFOLINK.COM DOT BR]
>Sent: 20 August 1999 03:50
>To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>Subject: Re: ADSM Bottleneck
>NT is your bottleneck !
>Sorry for the strong way of saying, but scalability is not the strong poin
>for NT, so adding processors is not closer to linear (ideal) performance
>growth.
>I am not sure, but NT licensing for SMP systems and the NT system itself
>may not be worth the performance gain.
>If I were you I would add memory and try to distribute I/O through many
>disk/tapes controllers. Probably results will be a lot better than just
>adding another CPU.
>good luck,
>Rodrigo
>>We are about to spec out a new ADSM server running NT on the Intel pla
>>We are interested in opinions of what are the main bottlenecks for ADS
>>performance. For instance, would adding multiple processors increase
>>performance (especially ADSM DB) or is memory more important. Thanks i
>>advance.
>>Seth Forgosh