The ADSM server for Win NT runs in real NT threads; to see this add the
"Threads" display to the task manager. My currently quiet ADSM server
running on NT is, in fact, using 33 threads.  The number varies, and
averages around 30. This system is a uniprocessor, by the way.

And, there are many references that NT threads can be scheduled to run
simultaneously on different processors in a multiprocessor system.  You
don't have to do anything special to get this to happen; it is part of the
original NT design (see Inside Windows NT by Helen Custer for a thorough
discussion of thread scheduling and MP synchronization in the NT kernel).

Finally, if you watch an NT system where ADSM is busy and nothing else is
running, you will see in the performance monitor that the CPU usage in a
multiprocessor is about the same over a reasonable window (10s of seconds).
We have configured many multiprocessor NT systems
over the several years and have observed this expected behavior.  These days
we use uniprocessor PIIIs on the low to midrange systems and dual processor
PIII Xeons on the high end.  We also try to keep NICs, disks SCSI and tape
SCSI on separate PCI busses on the larger machines when we have the busses
available.

There are certainly going to be places in TSM where the threads will be
stalled because they are waiting on a mutex or some other such resource, and
it would take a TSM internals person to answer definitively as to what kinds
of operations can actually be run in parallel inside the TSM server.
However, this is an OS independent issue; if threads are stalled for a
mutex, that stall is going to happen on AIX, and Solaris, and any other
platform; NT is not at a disadvantage here.

John Sorensen
Storage Solutions Specialists, Inc.
sorensen AT storsol DOT com
http://www.storsol.com