Hi Wanda

Two tiny questions:

a) Do the users need instant access to the files or is long-term archiving an 
option?

b) Not sure if it would help the issue with long respons times when browsing, 
but HSM might be an option?

Do you have an SLA for this system? Any decided restore times? Your biggest 
problem isnt now, it's when u need to restore those 70 million files. So 
reducing the amount of files either by HSM or archiving isnt even an option, 
it's something you need todo. Doing RAID, box mirroring and such wont protect 
the system from logical errors, so counting on HW todo the job just wont do it. 
The restore times needs to be acceptable from TSM.

Upgrading to W2K8 wont solve the issue since you will still have troubles 
browsing the fileserver, backing it up, and in the end, restoring it.

Best Regards

Daniel Sparrman

-----"ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU> skrev: -----


Till: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Från: "Prather, Wanda" <wPrather AT ICFI DOT COM>
Sänt av: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
Datum: 02/25/2011 20:03
Ärende: Windows servers with a kazillion files and Win2K8...

I have a site with an application that generates kazillions of tiny files that 
are stored forever.
I've already yelled about it, but it's a purchased, customer-facing black-box 
app that they really can't change.
(Naturally, when it was bought umpty years ago, nobody thought about the 
problem reaching this size or what the ramifications would be.)  Every day the 
app creates more files.

They have multiple Win2K3 servers that already have multiple luns containing 
over 35M files each, one is over 75M files.

We are using journaling to back them up successfully (most days).
But it's a struggle just to expand the file tree with Windows explorer, and 
there are exposures on the days when the journal gets overrun (takes 72 hours 
for TSM to scan the filesystem and revalidate the journal).

Looking for anything that might help save our bacon.

Has anybody had experience with this issue and Win2K8?
Does Win2K8 do any better than Win2K3 at handling huge numbers of files in 1 
NTFS directory?
Upgrading the OS is something application-independent we might be able to do.

Thanks for any insight!
W


Wanda Prather  |  Senior Technical Specialist  | wprather AT icfi DOT 
com<mailto:wprather AT icfi DOT com>  |  www.jasi.com<www.jasi.com%20>
ICF Jacob & Sundstrom  | 401 E. Pratt St, Suite 2214, Baltimore, MD 21202 | 
410.539.1135