What's the preferred method of configuring a large NT fileserver for optimum
data recovery speed?

Can I do something with co-location at the filesystem (what IS a filesystem
in NT/2000?) level?

We're bringing in an IBM NAS to replace four existing NT servers and our
recovery time for the existing environment stinks. The main server currently
has something over 800,000 files using 167 GB (current box actually uses NT
file compression, so it's showing as 80 GB on NT). We had to do a recovery
last year (raid array died) and it ran to 40+ hours; I'm getting the
feedback that over 20 hours will be un-acceptable.

The TSM server and the client code are relatively recent 4.2 versions and
will be staying at 4.2 for the rest of this year (so any neat features of
TSM 5 would be nice to know but otherwise unuseable :-)

To add to the fun and games, this will be an MS cluster environment. With
1.2 TB of disk on it. We do have a couple of weeks to play around and try
things out before getting serious. One advantage to the MSCS is that disk
compression is not allowed, so that should speed things up a bit on the
restore.

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc