Iain Jack said, in part..

>                                                          ...  Can anyone 
> recommend the
> best way to allocate mini disks to the BACKUP and ARCHIVE pools?
> For example is it better to allocate a cluster of 200 cylinder disks? Or
> to allocate full volume mini disks?
> We are a VMESA 1.2.0 shop using 3380ks.

I don't know anything about the ADSM  internal data base algorithms,
but for your own flexibility, you might want to consider several
mini-disks instead of one.

Each mini-disk costs you about 1 mega-byte of disk space for
overhead, but for a 200 cylinder mini-disk, that's less than 1%.

If at some point you found a disk performance problem, you might wish
to move some of the data base or log to another volume/channel.  This
would be a bit more complicated for a full-volume mini-disk (without
making additional space available to ADSM).

At U Maine System (about 50 clients, half desktop machines, half
file-servers ("big" systems)), we typically don't have disk
performance problems.  ADSM loves a big cpu, though.

cheers,

Wayne T. Smith
Systems Group -- CAPS        internet: wts AT maine.maine DOT edu
University of Maine System   BITNET/CREN: WTS@MAINE