Hi Eliza,

My condolences; I don't envy the position that you're in.  I'm not sure
what arguments have been laid out against staying with AIX, but perhaps you
could put some weight on the other pan of the scale by doing some testing
and extrapolating the results to approximate the real costs of migrating to
a new platform.

It's probably a pretty safe bet that your users at Tech are not willing to
abandon their historical backup data, so you are probably faced with doing
an export/import of data to get that across to whatever new platform you
will go to.  Depending o how great a hurry management is to get AIX and/or
IBM server hardware out the door, side-by-side co-existence might be an
option. Not a very attractive one in my mind, but a possibility.)

Is there a medium-size representative client node that you could perform a
test of the export/import process with?  It should be one that has been
active for a while, so that the data is spread across volumes, rather than
being on one or a couple of tapes. This is assuming that you are not using
collocation.  If you are, "data spread" should be much less of an
issue.  If you don't have a test TSM server that can access the 3590
drives, it would be a good idea to temporarily rename the node for the
duration of the export so that you can import it to the same server.

Some factors that you might want to keep in mind as you approach this with
an eye toward presenting the cost(s) of migration:

        Export will not automatically free tapes
                on the source server; you'll need
                enough tapes (and slots) available to create
                the export and to import to the new server.
        How much "slack" time do you have on your six drives?
                Will you be able to perform these migrations
                and still perform the work required to keep
                the other backups running on the "old" AIX system?
        Even doing these migrations one at a time, will the
                downtime for any particular system be prohibitive?
                Can your users/applications tolerate that kind of downtime
without
                good backups?

I don't have any hands-on with TSM on either Linux or Solaris, so I can't
speak to the pros or cons of either, but perhaps the costs of the migration
scenario will be persuasive enough to at least slow, if not entirely stop
the pressures to migrate.

Let us know how you make out with this "adventure".

Ted

Ted Byrne
Blacksburg, VA


At 10:53 AM 4/20/2004, you wrote:

TSMers,

Please help me NOT migrate the server to a different platform from AIX.

server:
4way P660, 3G memory running AIX 5.1
3494 with 6 FC 3590E tape drives connected to 2 SAN switches
90G database at 60% utilized on a Shark
24T of backup data
2600 3590E tapes
460 clients: Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX

There has been a change in management, and to put it mildly, certain people
do not like IXX and want to see it out of the machine room.
I have to put in a strong argument on why TSM has to run on AIX.  The two
platforms I am offered are Linux and Solaris.  Management wants to keep the
3494 and all its tapes because of the sunk cost.

I have been running ADSM/TSM/ITSM v2/v3/v4/v5 for the past 8 years on a
J30 and then the P660 and am perfectly happy with TSM on AIX.  The two IBM
CEs who work on our hardware are wonderful.  Migrating to a different
platform is going to be a nightmare.  How long will backup be
down to export/import 460 clients with 24T of data?

Realistically, I know I can only stall it for 2 more years.  After we
outgrow the P660, the new hardware we buy will run either Solaris or Linux.
What is your experience with TSM server running on either one?

Thanks in advance,
Eliza Lau
Virginia Tech Computing Center
Blacksburg, VA