Since you haven't gotten much response, and you did ask for ANY insight, I will offer mine! Be forewarned, I haven't used NetApp for TSM disk pools, but on paper it would seem like a good fit. NetApp / WAFL coalesces current write activity and spits the data out as full stripes to the underlying array. By writing a full stripe at a clip, it eliminates the need to perform any reads for RAID parity calculation (as its replacing the stripe in its entirety, it can calculate the proper parity with the data in hand). As such, your random-access disk pool almost turns into one big multiplexed sequential file. Assuming low restore / migration activity during your backup window, I'd expect you'd see very good write throughput, as very little head movement would be required (provided you have sufficient free space available in your aggregates so it doesn't have to hunt for free stripes).
I'm not sure how TSM determines the order of objects to transfer in the event of restores and migrations from disk pools - if they are selected in the order written the reads should have good locality to them. Depending upon how many concurrent write streams there were at time of backup, you may end up skipping over a fair amount of data, but presumably not hunting too far for that next stripe. On the other hand, if TSM calls for the objects in some non-temporal order, you're going to be hop-scotching all over and throughput will drop. I, too, would be interested in what others have to say, either from real-world experience or theoretical musings. -Ken -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mayhew, James Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 4:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: NetApp for Primary Disk Pool BUMP... Does anyone have thoughts on this? From: Mayhew, James Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2012 6:42 PM To: '[email protected]' Subject: NetApp for Primary Disk Pool Hello All, We are considering using a NetApp V6210 with some attached shelves as a block storage TSM primary disk pool. Do any of you have any experience using NetApp storage as a TSM primary disk pool? If so, how was your experience with this solution? Did you have any performance issues? How was it with sequential workloads? Any insight that you all can provide is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, James Mayhew Storage Engineer HealthPlan Services E-mail: [email protected] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify the sender by e-mail at the address shown.This email transmission may contain confidential information.This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) or entity to whom it is intended even if addressed incorrectly. Please delete it from your files if you are not the intended recipient. Thank you for your compliance.
