Gill,

We have an IBM TS7520 with 10 virtual tapes libraries and 10 drives at
the primary site; we also have an IBM TS7510 with 8 virtual tape
libraries and 10 drives at the secondary site. We don't have any
contention whatsoever with the VTL drives during the backups and TSM
administrative processes; the data is first written to disks then
migrated to the VTLs and finally migrated physical tapes (our physical
library has 18 drives).

Given the fact that the disk storage pool is going away in your
architecture, you may or may not need more than the 10 drives proposed
by the vendor - it depends in the workload and backups, admin processes
scheduling you will place on the VTL. Wanda's suggestion about the
gradual phase in will provide you definite VTL answers specific to your
environment rather than relying on guesses from vendors.

BERTAUT TCHUISE
Storage Support Administrator
Legg Mason Technology Services
*410-580-7032
BTchuise AT leggmason DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Gill, Geoffrey L.
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 6:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] VTL setups

For those with VTL's can you give me an idea of how many tape drives you
have defined? I'm listening to the vendors setup ideas and it seems to
me the 10 tape drives they want to define for TSM sure seems like a low
number when you take into consideration all the things that need to be
done and keeping in mind the disk storage pool goes away and every
backup now goes to tape.



I'd sure like to hear what sort of things you had to do to make things
run smooth. I didn't recommend getting the one we have and certainly
haven't heard anything good about it here or elsewhere.



Thanks,



Geoff Gill
TSM Administrator
PeopleSoft Sr. Systems Administrator
SAIC M/S-B1P
(858)826-4062 (office)

(858)412-9883 (blackberry)
Email: geoffrey.l.gill AT saic DOT com



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