I feel your pain.
CIFS is a really, really slow protocol for scanning directories.

One obvious solution is to fire up another server to split the load.  You can 
use a proxy relationship to have the filesystem backup remain in whatever TSM 
relationship had it before.  (Have one customer that uses 4 different proxy 
servers to back up shares on an EMC NAS.)

If the problem is the filesystem itself, and one proxy can't scan the 10m files 
in the required window, your only choice is to put a client on the machine that 
has direct attachment to the filesystem and use journaling.

W


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Zoltan Forray
Sent: Friday, August 16, 2013 11:30 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Maximum TSM nodes per server

We are starting to experiencing performance issues on a server that acts as the 
"head" for multiple (31 currently) TSM nodes. This server CIFS mounts multiple 
departmental filesystems - all in various EMC SAN's.  Each filesystem is a 
different TSM node.

The "head" server is running Windows 2012 server with 12GB RAM and 2-quad-core 
processor.

Anyone out there something like this?  What are the realistic limits?  I have 
tried spreading the backup start times as much as I can.

As expected, a lot of the time is spend scanning files - 1-node is >10M files.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Suggestions?

--
*Zoltan Forray*
TSM Software & Hardware Administrator
Virginia Commonwealth University
UCC/Office of Technology Services
zforray AT vcu DOT edu - 804-828-4807
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