ADSM-L

Capacity Planning

2005-03-21 12:38:44
Subject: Capacity Planning
From: Jeff Kloek <tsm AT KLOEK DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:23:30 -0600
For the last few years, I was the point-man in the UNIX department at my
last job for Tivoli Storage Manager support. We had a separate department
called Storage Management that contained the "Architects" of that
environment. During my time there, I got very interested in TSM and have
studied it a great deal.

Now I'm at a company who also uses TSM, but where there isn't an
architecture type of group, and we're running into growth related issues.

I believe the end-run of a detailed study of TSM results in:
a)  the ability to predict the impact of a specific client (or group of
clients) growth on the overall needs for that environment, and
b) the ability to predict the increased needs of storage pool disk and
tape mount requirements based on changes like that in item a) above.

Up to this point, I'm just not quite there. I've built some reports like
daily host backup amounts, daily changes in host occupancy; studied the
details of the policy domains, policy sets, management classes, and copy
groups, obtained a general understanding of the retention policies, etc.,
but I still don't quite have my hands around the big picture.

Right now, we're in a situation where our daily backups are going to disk
just fine. The problem we're having with the enormous increase in Email
backups (we don't currently delete anything due to a recent decree by
management) is that our offsite copy pool backups are no longer completing
within the 24 hour magic window.

I suspect there is a set of procedures that is generally accepted that
would help to define increasing needs for the TSM environment. I'm sure I
need to begin capturing the daily amounts of data that gets backed up in
the BACKUP STORAGE POOL processes, and perhaps even the MIGRATION
processes.

All that being said, is there a set of guidelines that can help me define
exactly what increase in hardware we might need, or something that would
help me to tell management that "to add another X amount of drives would
get us back to completing the offsite copy pool process (and thus the
entire day's processing) to within the 24 hour window?

Details:
TSM Server 5.2.2.0 on AIX 5.2 7026/6H1; 4Gb memory; 3584 Library; 18 LTO2
drives. Currently there are no drives to spare to add additional mounts
for the Backup Storage Pool processes.

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>