Jorge,
I think you will find that most of the major vendors put out a
reliable offering, so you will get responses from people across the
community who use and like all of them. But here is one TSM admin's
opinion.
The main environment I support has 23 TSM instances, with 7 EMC Disk
Libraries. They have been in place over three years. Almost all backup
data from these TSM instances goes directly into the EDLs, without going
through disk storage pool first. At the largest site, they have 10 TSM
instances all sharing one EDL model 4100. Every day about 15TB of new
backup flows into it. Then it has to make two copies, one to copy
storage pool tape, and another to migrate the data that is a couple days
old to primary storage. They can hold at most a few day's data on disk.
So that means that this one EDL is handling over 45TB of I/O every day.
It has been a real workhorse.
Having said that, every three to six months or so, this EDL will run
out of memory and crash, and have to be restarted. I think that there
must be some small memory leak in the code somewhere, and with the huge
volume of I/O, eventually virtual memory gets exhausted. We have put on
various service packs as they were recommended to us, but the problem
has never gone away. If we are going to have some sort of outage to the
environment, to work on some other component, we sometimes perform a
preemptive reboot of the EDL, just to start fresh so we won't have to
worry about a problem for a few months.
The other 6 EDLs in the environment are not nearly as loaded as this
one is, and they have never exhibited this problem with virtual memory,
so I feel like it is directly tied to how much I/O it does, and not to
any real flaw in the product. The other 6 never crash at all.
The best way I have found to configure the EDL library to work with
TSM is to configure it to emulate an IBM3584 tape library, with LTO1
tape drives. On the TSM server you use the IBM tape drivers (Atape for
AIX, or IBMtape for Windows). This has been very easy to configure, and
very reliable. (On Windows, make sure you turn on persistent binding on
the FC adapter.) One other thing we do is configure the LTO1 tape
cartridges to be 50GB tapes. This will give you a little better overall
utilization, because you can reclaim tapes sooner as the data ages. But
you can make your own decision about that, based on your workload.
If you are doing this in an AIX environment, I have some ksh scripts
I have written to rename the AIX logical devices to make it easier to
manage in a TSM library sharing environment. I can share those offline.
Best Regards,
John D. Schneider
The Computer Coaching Community, LLC
Office: (314) 635-5424 / Toll Free: (866) 796-9226
Cell: (314) 750-8721
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ADSM-L] Virtual Tape Library
From: Jorge Amil <jorgeamil AT HOTMAIL DOT COM>
Date: Tue, June 01, 2010 9:57 am
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Hi everybody.
What VTL solution do you recommend?Our main backup tool is TSM and we
also have Networker for documentum backup.
I mainly look for IBM,EMC,HP,Netapp.
Thanks in advance
Jorge
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