ADSM-L

Re: [ADSM-L] RMAN direct to NFS

2012-07-11 14:39:52
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] RMAN direct to NFS
From: "Hart, Charles A" <charles_hart AT UHC DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:29:29 -0500
Hi Nick

1) We only carve out 1 vtape lib per 7650 - we then share that library
with 2-4 TSM instances on one AIX server, some installations will have
two 7650's to a aix p6 650.

2) 128 Drives was just a number - We get close 60-80 Drives as our DB
backups larger than 2gig goes to vtl so we get quite a few mounts

3) We share one and sometimes two 7650's with one vtl defined per
physical hosts, then have 2-4 instances share the 1-2 vtls so one
instance is a LM too.   We haven't done stg agents in a while, with us
we can't seem to scale the tsm instance big enough (v 5.5 - just
starting to get into v6.x where we will go dowon to one TSM instance per
host os.)  Seems that after 15TB ingestion per instance we need to turn
up a new instance cant get all the work done in a day.

I 'm hoping we can move toward more of a NFS model, I know EMC's DD has
it but not being able to get a DD in a gateway version doesn't alow us
to leverage our primary disk vendor for a cheaper for a good disk price.
I imagine 6PB of DD would be a lot more than 6PB of our current disk
technology.

The whole tape path management can be a pain, we do have a script that
will delete define etc, but even then it would just seem cleaner to go
sequential file devclass on NFS.  Maybe when the IBM 7650 goes NFS we
can leverage that but we'll see.  

We alomost got our DBA's on to a NFS target even without TSM but they
too were afraid of NFS and having to manage their own backup disk space.
arrggg 


Richard, 

I like youre layout of pro's and cons, we've seen NFS issues on our AIX
backup servers for 2ndcopy scripts etc and it can be painful.  We were
in a spot where we lost a 7650 and slid a SUn 7410 NAS device in for a
week or two it ownly had a couple 1gig interfaces so it was slow but
wrked well.  We were even thinking that we'd test some other NAS devices
for a NFS target instead of a "Backup Appliance" but that POC is on hold
due to too much day to day wrk. 


Charles 

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Nick Laflamme
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] RMAN direct to NFS

This is more about VTLs than TSM, but I have a couple of questions,
influenced by my shop's experience with VTLs.

1) When you say "40 VTLs," I presume that's on far fewer frames, that
you're using several virtual libraries on each ProtecTier or whatever
you're using?
2) I see that as 128 tape drives per library. Do you ever use that many,
or is this just a "because we could" situation? (We use 48 per library,
and that may be overkill, but we're on EMC hardware, not IBM, so the
performance curves may be different.)
3) Do I read 1) and 4) to mean that you're sharing VTLs among TSM
servers? Why, man, why? Can't you give each TSM server its own VTL and
be done with it? Or are you counting storage agents as TSM instances? 

I don't know if we'd have gone with VTLs if we were architecting this
from scratch, but as we went from tape-based to virtual technology, the
VTL interfaces made the transition logically simpler, and it appeased
the one team member who has an irrational hatred of NFS. We're now under
pressure to adopt a new reference architecture that is NFS based, not
VTL based. I'm skeptical about that will work, but because we're
changing everything except the fact that we're still a TSM shop, if it
doesn't go well, everyone will have a chance to blame someone else for
any problems. 

Now that I think about it, I have no idea how many paths we have defined
to all of our VTLs on all of our DataDomains. It might be 10,000 paths
ultimately, but when you define them a few hundred at a time, or fewer,
it's not so overwhelming! 

Nick


On Jul 10, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Hart, Charles A wrote:

> The IBM one, the reason I said overhead and complexity 
> 
> 1) We have 40 VTL's for 
> 2) 5120 Configured Vtape Drives 
> 3) More than 10,000 TSM Tape Drive Paths 
> 4) 100 TSM Instances that share all the above
> 
> It would "seem" that if we used a VTL that has NFS we would still have
> 40 Devices but not he 15K objets to manage (tape Drives and paths)
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Charles 

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