> Being old, I do not favor transmitting data over communications. It > usually is higher overhead then transmission over hardware.
On the other hand, if you're talking about networking over shared memory -- which is really what a guest LAN is -- then the amount of latency is so much smaller than the latency of the tape write that the *tape* is the bottleneck, not the comm link...8-) (one reason that you also want to give the guest running the Amanda server a lot of scratch disk space -- the network adapters are so fast in this environment that you'll need to spool to disk and then to tape to allow the server to keep up without eating the entire processor). > And that got reinforced with my experiences with real LAN systems. I > would be trying to fix a mainframe problem, by dialing into an IP > connection, and find I can't get anything done because the LAN people > are backing up servers over the LAN. So either the mainframe > sat, or I > had to come in for a coax session. In this case, I finally > talked a LAN > guy to come in at midnight - 1 AM and check the network performance. One of the beautifal things about virtualization: just define a new LAN segment, connect the machines that need to communicate. No collisions with production...8-) > But I'm still not convinced that Amanda is/will be our backup > solution. If you have a choice, use Bacula. Amanda is super-portable, but really relies on ever increasing tape sizes to compete with the exponential growth of disk storage. Bacula does a much better job handling datasets that span multiple tapes. > TSM initially sounded good, but it required scsi attached tape drives > (i.e. FCP attached), and at this point, I don't want to have separate > FICON and FCP attached tape drives. Right now, due to cost > and I don't > perceive the need. In a year or two, that may change. No, it's just a silly "feature". There is no technical reason for TSM not to use channel-attached drives, and good business reasons for it to do so (like people already OWN them...), but that's fallen on deaf ears. Time to build a better mousetrap. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
