Matt,

Check out a company called Bus-Tech (www.bustech.com) which makes a
product that allows open system disk to be connected to a mainframe via
escon or ficon.  They also have another product that allows you to use
cheap disk as virtual tape.

Steve Schaub
Systems Engineer, Operations & Storage
Haworth, Inc
616-393-1457 (desk)
616-886-8821 (cell)
Steve.Schaub AT Haworth DOT com 

-----Original Message-----
From: MC Matt Cooper (2838) [mailto:Matt.Cooper AT AMGREETINGS DOT COM] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 10:39 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: D2D backup with TSM


I am seriously looking at changing to a D2D system.  I know of other
people doing it with different backup software.  I know of no reason not
to do it with TSM.  I am not sure if I am going to use the ATA disk
array as the primary disk pool or a seconday disk pool behind SHARK
disk.  I would rather use it as the primary.  I watched a presentation
of a company that is using NEXSAN's ATA-BEAST as primary disk pool. They
said they are getting better than 100GB an hour and the disk is not
the bottle neck.  The company was not using TSM though.   The NEXSAN
disk seems to be much cheaper than everyone else's ATA arrays.  I
believe faster to  (70MB/sec).  My issue is our TSM server is running on
the mainframe and I must find some sort of adapter to connect ESCON to
Fibre channel.
Matt   

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Richard Rhodes
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2004 10:05 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: D2D backup with TSM

We recently had a presentation from EMC.  During this presentation they
discussed their new DL700 virtual tape library.  It got people talking
about a long term strategy of moving to a all disk based backup system.
So we started thinking of the pros and cons of how to go about setting
up TSM for a disk based backup system.

Here are some initial thought on ways to configure TSM for D2D backups.
We would be very interested in your thoughts/comments.  I doubt we are
the only people thinking about this topic.

1)Purchase a very large disk system (ata drives?) and put storage pools
on them.
    - use a standard DISK device pool for backups
        - how to reclaim space?  do you even need to?
        - fragmentation problems?
        - multiple node access concurrently
    - use a FILE device based pool
        - single node access per disk file volume
        - need to run reclamation
        - still stage to disk and migrate to FILE device based pool?
    - use a tape copy pool for offsite and backup
    - use a offsite disk pool somehow
        - iscsi over lan or fc if close enough (enough throughput?)
        - other?
    - must use client compression to get data compressed
        - we mostly don't do this today

2)  Purchase a virtual tape system like the DL700
    (bundle of a EMC Clariion and a FalconStor vts appliance)
    - provides compression for data
    - appliance is responsible for layout and use of disk space
    - can copy a virtual tape to a real physical tape for offsite
storage


Thanks

Rick