Hi Guys,

A customer has just come up with a request to run the TSM SAN Storage Agent
on a dedicated blade within an HP BladeSystem c7000 blade chassis.

Is anyone running with a SAN Storage Agent (it'll be Linux x86 with TSM 5.5)
in this kind of config?



I'm concerned about shared HBA/fibre access that I believe these blade
centres run with - the recommendation has always been to segregate disk and
tape traffic, but with virtualised HBAs I'm a little unsure of where I
stand. From what I have read of these systems, each blade has two HBA ports
internally, but the HP Blade Chassis presents these as 8 (4 per fabric)
outward facing 4Gbps ports (via some kind of passthrough mechanism). The
storage team say that they are zoning each of the ports within the blade to
disk (they run dual-fabric). This suggests to me that the only way we can
get the SAN Storage Agent to work here would be to zone in the tape drives
to these ports too, but that would result in sharing disk and tape which the
recommendation is not to do.

To clarify, the Linux servers each have their own blade, there's no OS
virtualisation going on for them, so this IBM.com article doesn't seem to
apply, or isn't particularly clear for me:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0
<http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=swg21239546>
&uid=swg21239546


Can anyone offer any guidance or experiences...?

Thanks,

/David Mc
London, UK