Hi all
I'm looking at a fastback solution for a customer that is converting
from a non-IBM mainframe solution to an all Windows/SQL Server 2008
infrastructure.
After nearly falling off my chair when I saw the list price of a
standard TSM/TDP for Databases solution Iooked at TSM Fastback, and this
looks like it might fit the bill at reasonable cost. However, looking at
the available documentation, I see a couple of possible show-stoppers.
First, the Deployment Guide Redbook is based on fastback 5.5 and states.
<quote>
Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack support for Windows Dynamic Disk is
limited to Simple Volumes. Spanned, Mirrored, Striped, and RAID-5
Dynamic Volumes are not supported at this time, and using them can
result in corrupted data.
</quote>
Is this likely to be an issue for a normally configured app residing on
LUNs on an enterprise SAN? Hey, cut me some slack I'm a unix guy.
Next, the deployment guide states
<quote>
FastBack Snapshot implications when client is rebooted When the client
is rebooted to correct an issue, you must consider the following:
Performance
The best FastBack performance currently documented is around 300-400
Mbps. Field experiences show the full backup is transferring data at
around 1 GB per minute. So, backing up a 4 TB volume can take a while
(4000 minutes or 67 hours, which is more than 2 days).
Delta blocks
Every time a server with FastBack Client is rebooted, it runs a delta
block snapshot. This snapshot takes approximately the same time as the
full snapshot to run. In the case of a 4 TB storage, the server is
unprotected for 2 to 3 days on every reboot.
</quote>
Is this still the case with Fastback 6.1? My databases are 2TB and I'm
not sure that a day or more without backup is going to be acceptable.
Third, I see a limitation of 40 clients per fastback server. Given the
rate at which VMs proliferate these days, that is going to max out my
server very quickly. Is this a hard limit or a suggested limit
depending on workload? I am looking at a Dell R515 with 12x2TB SATA
disks for my fastback server, raid5 as this is the cheapest way to buy
disk capacity. If I have to use multiple Fastback servers I'll need to
consider a number of frontend server boxes and a backend SATA array at
considerably increased purchase and housing costs.
Are there any other gotchas to worry about?
Thanks
Steve
Steven Harris
TSM Admin
Paraparaumu New Zealand.
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