Agreed that NDMP is awful. I think you're on the right track with your NFS
solution. Here's how we deal with it now:

* Break your NFS volumes up into different mount points (i.e. break
  /net/example/foo into /net/example/foo/dir1, /net/example/foo/dir2, ...).
  Reference each mount point using -domain.

* Break each schedule up using a combination of schedule nodes and proxy
  nodes. Associate the schedules with the schedule nodes, and then
  associate the storage back to the underlying node using -asnode. For
  instance, assuming a storage node of NFS-EXAMPLE, create two schedule
  nodes NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR1 and NFS-EXAMPLE-FOO-DIR2. Associate the first
  directory with the first node using "-domain=/net/example/foo/dir1" in the
  client options, and the second directory with the second node using
  "domain=/net/example/foo/dir2". Use -asnode=NFS-EXAMPLE in both.

This doesn't avoid all the concurrency problems; looking back, it might
have been better just to use many nodes with storage directly associated
with them and not use -asnode.

On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 07:26:36PM -0400, Dury, John C. wrote:
> Sorry  for revisiting this but I'm in a predicament now. Trying to backup the 
> NDMP device is a miserable failure and frankly just ugly.  I honestly can't 
> see why anyone would use TSM to backup any NDMP devices except for maybe 
> speed issues.
>
> We decided to mount all of the NFS shares locally on the TSM server and allow 
> them to be backed up that way but now the problem is that even with 
> resourceutilization set to 20, it still takes 18+ hours just to do an 
> incremental because there are millions and millions of files in all of those 
> NFS shares. So this isn't going to work either. I can try the proxy node 
> solution but frankly I'm skeptical about it also because of the tremendous 
> number of small files. Of course this is all for a mission critical 
> application so I have to come up with a workable solution and I'm running out 
> of ideas.

--
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 AT u.washington DOT edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
-- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354
-- University of Washington School of Medicine