All,

I have a customer with a Network Appliance NFS server.  Since there is
not a Network Appliance ADSM client, they have been NFS mounting all
the filesystems to their SP/2 ADSM server and backing it up that way.

Today they are using TCP/IP to backup their ADSM server (the NFS mounted
filesystems is the only data on the box that needs to be backed up).  I
read on the list a couple of months ago where several people recommended
using shared memory instead of TCP/IP for this environment.  I attempted
to explain this to my customer, but he didn't follow my logic as to why
shared memory would be faster in this environment over TCP/IP.  We
discussed the fact that the Netapp box is using UDP to transfer the data
to the AIX based ADSM server, and how adding TCP/IP on top of that would
slow things down, but he still didn't understand how using shared memory
would alleviate some of that overhead and allow the backup to finish
quicker.

Can anybody explain to me the dynamics of why using shared memory to
backup the Network Appliance box would be better than using TCP/IP?


Joshua S. Bassi
Storage Management Team Lead
Dickens Services Group
jbassi AT gloryworks DOT com
(404) 386-9848