David Not 100% sure on the HP Bladecenters, but I do have experience with the IBM ones - probably all of a muchness.
The IBM ones can either use passthru modules (which present every port of the dual port card on each blade) or switches. From what you are saying, I'd have thought you have switches. However this does not alter your issue. You have 2 options: 1. Stay separate and have no resilience for Disk or tape 2. Keep resilience and share the ports for both disk and tape. (as you have said) FWIW, I'd have a go at option 2 as possibly the safest option. how much data are you backing up and to what target drives? Steven Steven Langdale Global Information Services EAME SAN/Storage Planning and Implementation ( Phone : +44 (0)1733 584175 ( Mob: +44 (0)7876 216782 ΓΌ Conference: +44 (0)208 609 7400 Code: 331817 + Email: [email protected] David McClelland <[email protected]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[email protected]> 29/09/2009 14:01 Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[email protected]> To [email protected] cc Subject [ADSM-L] TSM SAN Storage Agent on HP Blade - sharing disk and tape? Caterpillar: Confidential Green Retain Until: 29/10/2009 Hi Guys, A customer has just come up with a request to run the TSM SAN Storage Agent on a dedicated blade within an HP BladeSystem c7000 blade chassis. Is anyone running with a SAN Storage Agent (it'll be Linux x86 with TSM 5.5) in this kind of config? I'm concerned about shared HBA/fibre access that I believe these blade centres run with - the recommendation has always been to segregate disk and tape traffic, but with virtualised HBAs I'm a little unsure of where I stand. From what I have read of these systems, each blade has two HBA ports internally, but the HP Blade Chassis presents these as 8 (4 per fabric) outward facing 4Gbps ports (via some kind of passthrough mechanism). The storage team say that they are zoning each of the ports within the blade to disk (they run dual-fabric). This suggests to me that the only way we can get the SAN Storage Agent to work here would be to zone in the tape drives to these ports too, but that would result in sharing disk and tape which the recommendation is not to do. To clarify, the Linux servers each have their own blade, there's no OS virtualisation going on for them, so this IBM.com article doesn't seem to apply, or isn't particularly clear for me: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0 <http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=swg21239546> &uid=swg21239546 Can anyone offer any guidance or experiences...? Thanks, /David Mc London, UK
