Hi,

without going into SANergy per se, I would suggest to you to think
very carefully what problem you want to solve by using any SAN-shared
filesystem. I've seen GPFS and CXFS (SGI) being used in HPC quite
successfully, but only in very limited, high performance situations.
These filesystems are well established in those applications and only
in those applications for a reason.

As for SANergy, I've been testing with it a long time ago. The way it
worked at that time (LD_PRELOAD) was not the most charming solution,
not did it work with all applications (apachectl would crash with the
LD_PRELOAD set). Of course, SANergy is certified with TSM, so as long
as you just use TSM with the LD_PRLOAD set, you can always blame IBM ;-)

IMNSHO, in a TSM application, LAN-free is usually not what you want,
and if you do, you probably need LAN-free to tape rather then LAN-free
to disk (where SANergy comes into play). As for a blade to host a TSM
server, usually a blade has insufficient i/o capabilities to be a mid-
range or high-end TSM server. There are just to few i/o capabilities.

AIX is (again in my not so humble opinion) the most robust OS there is
when it comes to housing TSM. You can push AIX much further in terms
of i/o load than any other OS, and I've found it to be quite
maintenance-free. A low-end pSeries system will not cost the world,
not even compared to a blade.... Having your TSM environment
completely independent of your production environment is always a good
idea.

On 26 mei 2009, at 19:22, Gill, Geoffrey L. wrote:

Is anyone out there using SANergy in their environment? With the
changes
we're going through it looks like the environment, wherever it's going
to be housed, is going to allow changes. I'm looking for information
from anyone who is using TSM in a SAN environment instead of a
segregated backup network but would like to hear arguments for or
against either. I'm interested in which platform you chose, why, what
sort of challenges you've had and the stability of your environment.
I'm
being steered towards Linux but would prefer to stick with AIX. The
question is what sort of horsepower I'll need for either. The folks
here
want me to use an HP blade BL460c that can house lots of memory and
max
8 Cores. Only 3 slots available for add-on cards, and a 10Ge port,
unfortunately I have not found anything that explains the environment
well enough to figure out if this will suffice. If it turns out the
size
of the blade allows us to build the proper size environment then I
think
I can convince them to purchase a similar IBM box for the same cost
so I
can stay with AIX. If anyone has worked with both and can give me good
arguments 'for' AIX that would also be helpful.



I can bring up a test environment now and move a couple of tape drives
to it along with a few TB of disk space on the SAN for disk storage
pools. If this works out well I'd probably move 150-200 nodes to it
for
backups. Hopefully some of you have something similar already in place
which will provide the necessary info to help in making a good
decision
moving forward.



Thanks for any advice you can lend.



Geoff Gill
TSM Administrator
PeopleSoft Sr. Systems Administrator
SAIC M/S-B1P
(858)826-4062 (office)

(858)412-9883 (blackberry)
Email: geoffrey.l.gill AT saic DOT com

--
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622