We have had a couple of customers over the years running TSM on Solaris.  I 
must echo Mike's comments. As Solaris would optimistically finish third in IBMs 
race for resources there will necessarily be fewer resources both on the 
development and support side.  If/when there are problems they will be solved 
more slowly than on the Windows or AIX. I guess I would enter the TSM on 
Solaris world with caution. That said, I have found that if you are a very good 
Solaris person, the issues are much easier to solve as you can often walk the 
IBM resource through the problem. But it will take more of your time if there 
is a problem.

The most prevalent issues we have seen are integrating with libraries and 
drives as you would expect. Perhaps if you stay with IBM tape products these 
problems would be less?  Who knows.

Kelly Lipp
CTO
STORServer, Inc.
485-B Elkton Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
719-266-8777 x7105
www.storserver.com


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
De Gasperis, Mike
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 9:09 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Preferred TSM Platform

We're primarily a Solaris based TSM shop, our backup server platforms
are T2000's and T5220's currently which seem to be very good at handling
the I/O of the newer T10000A & B drives along with the speeds of LTO's
and what not.  Most of our servers are loaded up with dual port 4Gb
Emulex cards usually eight total HBA ports per server.  Network wise we
use the onboard 4 Gb ports and usually a dual port Gb card and
Etherchannel/trunking to give us a large pipe for backup traffic.  Speed
wise the machines are great for an enterprise solution, price wise I
think they're fantastic as well.  The only issues we seem to run in to
is IBM & Solaris pointing fingers at each other when there are
complicated bugs encountered that can be resolved via simple queries to
get to the root of the problem.  We're primarily using SAN based storage
SUN/EMC arrays along with EDL's, disk suite management is usually done
with Veritas for us though mpxio is always an option.  For any disk we
use in TSM we typically use raw volumes and not formatted file systems.

I think the preferred platform is still AIX as TSM just seems to perform
better on it with less of these odd bugs we see from time to time.  The
new Sun servers though are a great buy performance wise and really do
handle these newer tape drive speeds well.  Most of these new servers
we're using we can't even get the CPU usage to go above 40% yet with
400-500 clients on them.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Sergio Fuentes
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 10:58 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Preferred TSM Platform

We're actually considering a new platform for future TSM servers simply
because
we're not an AIX shop anymore (TSM being the lone holdout).  We're not a
very
good windows shop either, and our strength is really in Solaris and/or
Linux,
technically speaking.

When I compare the hardware and LVM features for Solaris with those of
Linux, I
can see the benefits of Solaris.  But this listserv group has me
second-guessing
myself since I have yet to hear from someone with a Solaris-based TSM
infrastructure.  (I would stick with AIX if I could, but you know...
politics).

Solaris 10 and the built-in features of ZFS alone have kind of swayed me
towards
Solaris.  It's the only native LVM-based filesystem that I think can
compete
with what I'm used to, namely JFS2.  As for hardware, Sun offers some
pretty
hefty I/O-centric boxes, with a hefty pricetag.  But the pricey p650
that we're
on now has lasted almost 7 years, is still very stable and not breaking
much of
a sweat.  Still, the range of servers that Sun offers (which I don't see
in the
Dell world) is another advantage.

Any thoughts from anyone running a TSM server on Solaris?  We could use
the
insight since I believe we'll be rolling out a development environment
on
Solaris as a proof-of-concept.  Anyone familiar with DB2 performance on
Solaris?

Thanks!
SF

Jim Zajkowski wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Strand, Neil B. wrote:
>
>> consider Solaris
>
> Actually I'm considering replacing my Linux TSM server with Solaris -
> either SPARC or x86 - predominately because Solaris has a fast TCP/IP
> stack, ZFS, and fewer driver issues than on Linux.  Has anyone also
> moved from Linux to Solaris?
>
> --Jim