Wow!  Quite a setup.  I've worked on a couple of engagements with 24 x 3592 
tape drives, but 72 drives, 1900 paths, and 200 stg agents must be interesting, 
to say the least.

Off the top of my head:

Advantages:  1 scratch pool, "lazy man's load balancing", with all TSM clients 
accessing all drives.

Disadvantages:  single point of failure with one LM (even if HA'ed, would be a 
mess to clean up if a failure occurs while busy, and with 50 TB per night, I 
assume the environment is busy 24x7), difficult management and maintenance of 
all the paths, spaghetti galore for any VISIO of the environment, D/R requires 
tracking all tapes as opposed to a necessary subset, conflict of scheduling if 
all 72 drives are in use prempting another instances processing, plus there's 
got to be a few other gotchas.

At the risk of offending the architect, it sounds to me like not enough 
planning went into the design (which could be due to lack of customer 
requirements).  Most shops, with various applications and purposes, would divvy 
up the TSM resources (prod, test, QA, DBs, file servers, etc.), and come up 
with something that has several specific areas designed for a particular goal.

Do all 200 stg agents need LAN-free?  If less than 300-500 GB, a GB ethernet 
connection saves on licensing.  Are all 13 TSM server clients "load balanced", 
or would some be better utilized to use more disk for buffering, and fewer than 
72 drives for day-to-day processing?

Amazing.

----- Original Message -----
From: Sean English <sean.english AT WACHOVIA DOT COM>
Date: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 15:12
Subject: [ADSM-L] Question on TSM environment sizes
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU

> Just wanted to poll the list and find out if anyone has a setup
> similar to
> ours and any experiences (positive and negative) with that setup.
>
> 1 TSM library manager running TSM 5.3.5.2 with 1900 drive path
> statements,18 frame 3584 tape library with 5600 tapes and 72
> 3592 drives
> 13 TSM library clients running TSM 5.3.3.1 and TSM 5.3.5.2 all
> connectingto the 1 TSM library manager
> Backing up around 50 TBs a night.
>
> Thanks,
> Sean English
>