Personal observation: My experience is that Windows systems are getting better every year, and they work great as mid-size TSM servers. But, they still can't push enough I/O for a system as I/O intensive as yours, or push as fast as a comparable AIX host. Best I can tell, even if you add more adapters to a Windows host, that doesn't necessarily give you another effective path for I/O. (Disclaimer: I have no experience with the 64-bit Windows systems.)
We have been unable to achieve the same tape throughput on a Windows host that we had on an AIX host. Problem is not the tape itself. Could be the drivers, or the internal bus structure of the host, or a memory/buffer problem - who knows. Now the reason we scaled down from AIX to Windows is that we only have about 100 clients now to back up on that network, so this isn't a critial problem for us. It's plenty fast enough for the configuration. But out of curiosity I have talked to people at Tivoli, at Microsoft, and SHARE and asked "what tools does Windows have that would help me solve this problem?", and the answer all round was "hm - interesting question". Win2K performance tools give you no information about non-disk I/O. That itself should tell you whether or not you should go there. (NOT!!) My opinion and nobody else's - Wanda Prather "I/O, I/O, It's all about I/O" -(me) -----Original Message----- From: James R Owen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 4:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ?Can Linux or (Win?) replace AIX for I/O intensive TSM service? ?Can Linux (or Win?) replace AIX for hosting an I/O intensive TSM service? After scanning the past year's ADSM-L postings including Linux in the subject I have the impression that a few people are playing with Linux hosting a TSM service, but real I/O intensive TSM services are still mainly hosted by AIX. ?Is anyone already using or actively planning to use Linux (RedHat EL 3.0?) to host an I/O intensive TSM service similar to any described under the recent ADSM-L thread, "Sizing an AIX platform and tape libraries"? We believe we are approaching the maximum that can be achieved w/ TSM: v5.2.1.3 OS: AIX 5.1 (64bit) CPU: IBM 7025-6F1 w/ 4 * 750Mhz proc's + 3GB RAM SAN: 1 Gb w/ EMC Symmetrix 8830 LAN: 1 Gb Ethernet ATL: IBM 3494 w/ 6 * 3590E drives IBM 3584 w/ 4 * 3580 LTO1 + 2 * 3580 LTO2 drives This configuration is successfully supporting our current ITS TSM service (see details below), but we believe we either need a major performance boost or to split this load onto an additional host platform: Linux, Win*, or must we remain w/ AIX for I/O performance? to handle expected additional growth. Which platform have you chosen (or would you choose) for similar TSM service? Yale ITS TSM Service: -------------------- Active Clients: 2400 <= 3d, 2500 <= 7d, 2700 <= 35days Servers: 151 WinNT,2K* 105 Linux 20 Solaris 9 AIX 7 SQL-BT (Oracle) 3 Mac 2 TDP's: MSSQL,MSexchg: 2 + 1 [new] 2 Personals: 2549 WinNT,2K*,XP 2230 Win98,ME 26 Mac 183 Linux 50 Solaris 5 AIX,DEC*X,HPUX,IRIX: 1 ea. [new] 51 Expected growth: +500-600 clients for several years +20% data for existing clients/year? TSM DB: 75.7% of 160GB BAckup DB w/ LTO1 HCmpr. takes 2.3h EXPIre Inv examines ~6M obj, deletes ~1M obj. in 8-9h Disk STGpools: 600 + 180GB Nightly Backup Period: 15:30-08:00+ Weeknight Backup Load: 500-650GB+ Thanks for any experience/insight you are willing to share with us! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (203.432.6693)
