"ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU> wrote on 09/29/2011
01:34:23 PM:

> The elephants in the room:
>
> It is tempting, once DD gets in the door, to move all database
> backups (the typical TDP/RMAN and SQLLiteSpeed stuff) to go directly
> to DD. (No TSM involved, so save money on licenses?)
>

This is exactly our big discussion.

Our DD's are currently on TSM servers that are scheduled to go away
next year.  At that point we will re-purpose the DD's for other duty.
Our big discussion is what would make best use of them.
We've come up with two options:

1)  Use for the file pool for windows nodes.

This is the simplest and most straight forward use since it's just a
swap out of tape for a file pool.  We think this would really help
in a DR situation with many concurrent restores running since file
pool volumes can have multiple readers.  We would have to put
10g ethernet cards in our TSM servers, but that's about it.

2)  Use for our BIG Oracle systems that use lanfree storage agents and
TDPO.

We have a bunch of big SAP systems (in two tsm instances) that would
be really good use of the DD.  It's highly dedupable/compressable
data and is a very large part of our total TSM occupancy.

But, how to use the DD with this environment (31 lanfree/storageagents
for big Oracle/Rman systems).  The only supported method lanfree
would be VTL, and we REALLY want to get rid of all the tape
setup and stuff. We also don't have the VTL license for the DD.

As we started to think about it, we realized that TDPO/lanfree is simply
providing a container for Oracle/RMAN.  The value add by TSM is
handling tape and creating offsite copy.

Oracle/RMAN is capable of writing straight to disk by itself.  If we
were to directly NFS mount the DD to the Oracle servers and have RMAN
back them up directly to the DD, we could bypass TSM completely.
No more lanfree/tdpo licensing, setup, rmt devices.  It would really
simplify the environment.  But, it would require much new work.  We've
discussed putting a 10g ethernet card in each AIX chassis and sharing
it among the lpars.

In other words, this option would be a lot of work and cost, but
could be a huge gain in simplifying the environment and eliminating
TSM licensing costs.


Oh what to do . . . we have some time to think about it . . .

Rick





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