I-O. I-O, it's all about I-O..... I'm not a Windows heavy, and I don't consider myself an AIX heavy, either (in fact I'm not sure I know anything any more -- better not continue down that road...)
But I've done a lot of performance work over the years, and I've done TSM on Windows, TSM on AIX, and TSM on OS/390. They ALL work, remarkably well, UNTIL you start stressing the hardware. TSM, like any other I/O intensive application, gives the hardware a real workout, and is especially brutal on tape. If it's a low-load TSM system, a Windows server will work fine; base your decision on other factors, like YOUR AVAILABLE TAPE HARDWARE and it is supported on Windows; total cost of ownership INCLUDING THE PEOPLE; can you afford a dedicated server or do you need to share with other applications, etc. There are always personal preferences: For instance, the Windows version has more Wizards that make it easier to set up on the front end. Personally I don't like that because later when there's a problem it's harder to debug because you have no clue what you did in the first place. But if the personnel you have available are all Windows-ready, then they can deal with a Windows TSM system much better than if you drop a Unix box in their midst. If it's a high-load TSM system, the question is whether you have the Windows hardware with enough oomph to move the I/O. (Don't even THINK about using an old cast-off system unit, or low-end tape hardware.) Consider, how big is your TSM DB? Is it 20 GB or 30 GB? Is it growing? If this were your company's business-critical application with a 20 GB data base, would you be comfortable running it on Windows? Three years ago, we knew our TSM systems here needed to run on AIX; our Windows hardware at the time would not support the load. With our new Netfinity servers, some of them just scream. We are moving our two low-load TSM servers from AIX to Windows. But the third TSM server still pushes too much I/O for us to be sure Windows can support it, or that it would be cost-effective to buy enough Windows hardware to be comparable. So the answer is IT DEPENDS!!! and the answer is changing all the time as the hardware changes. But I have confidence in the TSM server code on all 3 platforms. ************************************************************************ Wanda Prather The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab 443-778-8769 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" - Scott Adams/Dilbert ************************************************************************
