Thanks to all those who responded to my question, especially David Boyes who asked some questions back, and which I will attempt to answer:
>1) Do you have VM? If not, I'd recommend acquiring z/VM before you >seriously contemplate Linux-based services. Linux in a LPAR works, but >managing it for HA services is a serious pain, and you'll want at least >a warm failover server in case you need to do maintenance. Two LPARs is >a bit expensive for just fileserver traffic. We don't have VM today, but I understand it will be (almost) essential for any large-scale Linux deployment and I've included it in our proposal. >2) What is the ratio of reads to writes? Volume of transactions is >important; if your existing 4 servers are relatively busy, you probably >will need another OSA card or a faster card to avoid degrading >performance for the OS/390 system. You may want to investigate >alternatives to the OSA with better price/performance curves. I don't have this data yet. >3) Are the current servers colocated, or distributed? SMB and SMB over >IP are fairly bandwidth intensive, and IPX over IP is *very* chatty. >This will have an significant impact on your WAN if the servers are not >colocated today. The 4 servers I've mentioned are colocated with the 750 desktops, but if this project is successful we will want to expand to some of our remote sites. >4) Do you already have a mainframe hosted backup solution such as FDR or >TSM? If not, can you afford to dedicate a tape drive to the LPAR? We have TSM on AIX for Netware file backups which I assume we can use for Linux/Samba file backups. However I'm concerned about all that backup traffic going through the network and we'll be considering alternatives. We also plan to backup the Linux/Samba DASD with our OS/390 3390 volume dumps so we have a fast DR capability for file/print. >5) Are there long-distance WAN links involved in this setup? If so, you >may want to consider a more sophisticated architecture such as Samba >overlaying a larger scale enterprise file system like AFS. This will >substantially increase the scalability of the solution, at the price of >some additional complexity (and also offer some nice benefits in terms >of bandwidth optimization and backup solutions). If you're interesting >in details of this solution, drop me a note off-list. Possible in the future. Thanks again. Regards, Mark Darvodelsky, Royal SunAlliance Australia - Data Centre. Phone: +61-2-99789081 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CAUTION - This message is intended for the addressee named above It may contain privileged or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you must not use, copy, distribute or disclose it to anyone other than the addressee. If you have received this message in error please return the message to the sender by replying to it and then delete the message from your computer. Internet emails are not necessarily secure. Royal & SunAlliance does not accept responsibility for changes made to this message after it was sent
