Hi. I don't see much return on making those primary disk storagepools sequential, because once they get tape hardware, you can just "move data" or migrate the backup data off of the random diskpool volumes. In fact, it's more of a headache because you'll have to start reclaiming them and whatnot. Definitely stay with random access disk volumes in your primary diskpools.
For copypool, I wonder. Since your installation is so small, I wonder if you can get some hotswap drive bays (do those exist for IDE?), buy 2 more IDE hard drives (they're fairly cheap, aren't they?), and start an offsite rotation of your copypool disks. That would be cute. And much cheaper than investing in a new tape infrastructure to begin with. Hmm... I wonder if I can do that with Shark disk. But your copypool would have to be sequential, so that would complicate matters. If you can figure out how to do sequential volumes and reclamation and whatnot on disk, I would use those two disks as copypool, with or without the extra 2 disks for offsite. Then if you have an application based corruption of your primary diskpool volumes, your copypool has a good chance of surviving that because it's more of an asynchronous "mirror" process. Synchronous mirroring would be more vulnerable to application based corruptions. Have you given any thought to how you're going to manage your dbbackups? It's a good thing to have them on some other machine or media. You could back up your database to disk and ftp it to another machine, or mount remote disk and back up to it, or half a dozen other variations. Good luck. Alex Paschal Storage Administrator Freightliner, LLC (503) 745-6850 phone/vmail -----Original Message----- From: Maria Waern [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 8:14 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Your advice wanted! As a TSM newbie I'd be grateful for some hints and tips - I'm not after instructions because I have those! A customer has a small office, 15 or 20 people with laptops (20 Gb HDDs mostly) and a new Windows 2000/TSM server that contains 4x 60Gb IDE disks. They have no tape robot. What is the best way to set up storage pools on the disks? Use sequential pools instead of standard disk storage pools to provide for easier future storage pool backup should they acquire some tape robot (although this seems highly unlikely at the present time)? Also how big should each storage volume on the disks be? Presumably it's not a good idea to make one large (approx 60 Gb) storage volume on each disk? It may not even be possible to do this for all I know! Also, what about having two of the disks set aside for copy storage pools? They only have one machine dedicated for TSM just now and no off-site backup. I said it was a small office! Anyway, I was thinking to have a primary pool on two of the disks and dedicate the other two for a copy storage pool. Like I said I don't need instructions, just your ideas! Maria
