Tab,
I second EVERYTHING that was said about preferring AIX!
That being said, I have multiple Windows servers where the load isn't
high enough to justify AIX.
The largest has about 150 TSM clients, mostly file servers; we back up
on average, 80-100GB nightly.
Using raw disks, mirrored, for a 33GB TSM data base.
Pentium III Xeon 900Mhz, 4-way, Win2K3 SP1.
Works just fine, because we use the standard setup:
Clients back up to 100GB disk pool, stuff migrates out to the tape pool
as needed, tapes are copied around 4 in the morning.
Everything is generally done in about 6 hours, and we don't have any
real tight timelines to worry about.
What we DON'T have:
No LARGE data bases backing up where we need to worry about pushing
100's of GB from one host.
It's all relatively small stuff, and I/O speed isn't a big priority.
We are replacing the host later this year because of age; the next
machine will be faster but a 2-way. Haven't seen any benefit to the
4-way; backups aren't very CPU-consuming.
For 200 GB per day, a recent-model Windows host will handle the CPU load
just fine.
For you, the issue will be I/O, not CPU.
Now where I REALLY dislike Windows:
I've talked with people from Tivoli and from Microsoft and from SHARE;
there is NO instrumentation in Windows that will let you monitor what is
going on over a non-disk I/O bus. You hook tape to a Windows host, and
it's a mystery what happens. When I'm doing tape-to-tape operations, I
can't tell WHERE the bottleneck is. I don't have a really good notion
of how much data you can push through a Windows box, given you have
multiple HBA's/SCSI connections, but there is only 1 or 2 internal
buses. I can't tell how much memory is being used for the TAPE I/O
buffers, or if that is an issue.
As such I think it's harder to configure a Windows box good throughput
with multiple non-disk I/O devices.
If you are going to have problems, it will be with trying to connect 12
SCSI drives with only 4 SCSI cards, and that interesting item
"Semi-annual exports in the 2-5 TB range". If you have time constraints
in producing that EXPORT, than I/O speed is more important to you than
it is in my environment.
Wanda Prather
"I/O, I/O, It's all about I/O" -(me)
Wanda
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Tab Trepagnier
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:14 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Platform change to Windows?
We are considering migrating our TSM systems from AIX to Windows 2003.
I know that the experience of the forum participants is that AIX
provides
superior I/O performance, but where is that threshold?
These are our system details. I'd like for anyone with experience with
a
system of similar size to share their experiences regarding Unix vs.
Windows.
We are currently running TSM 5.1.10 on a 2-way 6H1 with 4 GB RAM.
We are considering running TSM 5.3.2 on a 2-way or 4-way 3.0 GHz Xeon
with
4 GB RAM. All non-OS I/O would be via GigE network and redundant 2 Gbs
fiber.
TSM system details:
DB: 32 GB @ 83% utilization
Log: 5 GB, roll-forward mode
Primary data: 16 TB with one copypool (another 16 TB to manage)
Nodes: 175 backing up during a 10-hour window
Average daily incoming data: ~ 200 GB; may be reduced via deployment
of
TDP Oracle
Disk: 1 TB DAS, 3 TB SAN
Tape: LTO-1, DLT8000, 3570XL, four SCSI drives each; libraries will be
consolidated
Daily copypool updates sent to vault
Semi-annual exports in the 2-5 TB range
Does that sound like a system that could reasonably be hosted on a
modern
Windows system? Is a 2-way adequate, or should we get a 4-way?
Thanks in advance.
Tab Trepagnier
TSM Administrator
Laitram, L.L.C.
|
