ADSM-L

Re: [ADSM-L] TSM SAN Storage Agent on HP Blade - sharing disk and tape?

2009-09-30 04:47:58
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM SAN Storage Agent on HP Blade - sharing disk and tape?
From: Steven Langdale <Steven.Langdale AT CAT DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:46:52 +0100
David

Not 100% sure on the HP Bladecenters, but I do have experience with the 
IBM ones - probably all of a muchness.

The IBM ones can either use passthru modules (which present every port of 
the dual port card on each blade) or switches.  From what you are saying, 
I'd have thought you have switches.

However this does not alter your issue.

You have 2 options:

1.  Stay separate and have no resilience for Disk or tape
2.  Keep resilience and share the ports for both disk and tape. (as you 
have said)

FWIW, I'd have a go at option 2 as possibly the safest option.

how much data are you backing up and to what target drives?

Steven

Steven Langdale
Global Information Services
EAME SAN/Storage Planning and Implementation
( Phone : +44 (0)1733 584175
( Mob: +44 (0)7876 216782
ü Conference: +44 (0)208 609 7400 Code: 331817
+ Email: steven.langdale AT cat DOT com

 



David McClelland <tsm AT NETWORKC.CO DOT UK> 
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
29/09/2009 14:01
Please respond to
"ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>


To
ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
cc

Subject
[ADSM-L] TSM SAN Storage Agent on HP Blade - sharing disk and tape?




Caterpillar: Confidential Green Retain Until: 29/10/2009 



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

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