Hi all I'm looking at a fastback solution for a customer that is converting from a non-IBM mainframe solution to an all Windows/SQL Server 2008 infrastructure.
After nearly falling off my chair when I saw the list price of a standard TSM/TDP for Databases solution Iooked at TSM Fastback, and this looks like it might fit the bill at reasonable cost. However, looking at the available documentation, I see a couple of possible show-stoppers. First, the Deployment Guide Redbook is based on fastback 5.5 and states. <quote> Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack support for Windows Dynamic Disk is limited to Simple Volumes. Spanned, Mirrored, Striped, and RAID-5 Dynamic Volumes are not supported at this time, and using them can result in corrupted data. </quote> Is this likely to be an issue for a normally configured app residing on LUNs on an enterprise SAN? Hey, cut me some slack I'm a unix guy. Next, the deployment guide states <quote> FastBack Snapshot implications when client is rebooted When the client is rebooted to correct an issue, you must consider the following: Performance The best FastBack performance currently documented is around 300-400 Mbps. Field experiences show the full backup is transferring data at around 1 GB per minute. So, backing up a 4 TB volume can take a while (4000 minutes or 67 hours, which is more than 2 days). Delta blocks Every time a server with FastBack Client is rebooted, it runs a delta block snapshot. This snapshot takes approximately the same time as the full snapshot to run. In the case of a 4 TB storage, the server is unprotected for 2 to 3 days on every reboot. </quote> Is this still the case with Fastback 6.1? My databases are 2TB and I'm not sure that a day or more without backup is going to be acceptable. Third, I see a limitation of 40 clients per fastback server. Given the rate at which VMs proliferate these days, that is going to max out my server very quickly. Is this a hard limit or a suggested limit depending on workload? I am looking at a Dell R515 with 12x2TB SATA disks for my fastback server, raid5 as this is the cheapest way to buy disk capacity. If I have to use multiple Fastback servers I'll need to consider a number of frontend server boxes and a backend SATA array at considerably increased purchase and housing costs. Are there any other gotchas to worry about? Thanks Steve Steven Harris TSM Admin Paraparaumu New Zealand.
