With only 6 nodes pushing data to the TSM server at a time, what kind of
throughput are you expecting the TSM server to have to handle (is the
network going to limit throughput? How much data do you expect the nodes
themselves to push?) I.e. do you really think with that many disks in your
disk pool you're going to see some discernable difference between jfs and
raw logical volumes? You'll see terrific performance regardless of which
route you go but you need to leverage the advantage of having so many
disks...

Keep in mind how TSM uses disk storage pool volumes. In your below scenario
you suggest having 32 disk pool volumes and yet you also mention only appox
6 nodes will be backing up at once. Assuming only 1 thread per node, you'll
only be accessing 6 of those 32 disk volumes at any one time. The other's
will sit idle while each node essentially backs up to only 1 disk at a time.
You wouldn't be leveraging the advantage of having so many disks..

Using striping or even RAID-5 makes much more sense. E.g. you could do as
Rich mentioned below. Or perhaps 6 RAID-5 arrays of 5 disks each with 2 hot
spares? Certainly makes admining easier since you'll never lose data. You're
going to have to take all these variables into consideration. How is TSM
going to hit those volumes you create? How is AIX going to write to the
disks given the configuration you're considering? How are the SSA adapters
and pathways going to handle the given configuration?

Gerald Wichmann
Sr. Systems Development Engineer
Zantaz, Inc.
925.598.3099 w
408.836.9062 c