I-O. I-O, it's all about I-O.....
I'm not a Windows heavy, and I don't consider myself an AIX heavy, either
(in fact I'm not sure I know anything any more -- better not continue down
that road...)
But I've done a lot of performance work over the years, and I've done TSM on
Windows, TSM on AIX, and TSM on OS/390. They ALL work, remarkably well,
UNTIL you start stressing the hardware. TSM, like any other I/O intensive
application, gives the hardware a real workout, and is especially brutal on
tape.
If it's a low-load TSM system, a Windows server will work fine; base your
decision on other factors, like YOUR AVAILABLE TAPE HARDWARE and it is
supported on Windows; total cost of ownership INCLUDING THE PEOPLE; can you
afford a dedicated server or do you need to share with other applications,
etc.
There are always personal preferences: For instance, the Windows version
has more Wizards that make it easier to set up on the front end. Personally
I don't like that because later when there's a problem it's harder to debug
because you have no clue what you did in the first place. But if the
personnel you have available are all Windows-ready, then they can deal with
a Windows TSM system much better than if you drop a Unix box in their midst.
If it's a high-load TSM system, the question is whether you have the Windows
hardware with enough oomph to move the I/O. (Don't even THINK about using
an old cast-off system unit, or low-end tape hardware.)
Consider, how big is your TSM DB? Is it 20 GB or 30 GB? Is it growing? If
this were your company's business-critical application with a 20 GB data
base, would you be comfortable running it on Windows?
Three years ago, we knew our TSM systems here needed to run on AIX; our
Windows hardware at the time would not support the load. With our new
Netfinity servers, some of them just scream. We are moving our two low-load
TSM servers from AIX to Windows. But the third TSM server still pushes too
much I/O for us to be sure Windows can support it, or that it would be
cost-effective to buy enough Windows hardware to be comparable.
So the answer is IT DEPENDS!!! and the answer is changing all the time as
the hardware changes. But I have confidence in the TSM server code on all 3
platforms.
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Wanda Prather
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
443-778-8769
wanda_prather AT jhuapl DOT edu
"Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" -
Scott Adams/Dilbert
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