I have (2) TSM servers on AIX (H50 and H70) with 2GB FC adapter. I have (15) 3590 and 6 (3580) tape drives hanging off a single adapter from each server. I'm sure in a lab somewhere that my single adapter could be shown to be a bottleneck when trying to stream data to all those drives...however in the real world that I happen to live in I rarely see the an adapter pushing more than 130mb. Not sure I would recommend this as best practice, but I have no real complaints. I will say that location of the adapters can make a significant difference in the throughput. For instance, sharing a given bus with GigE, SSA, and FC tape is going to introduce a bottleneck at the bus...just something to keep in mind. Some time ago I relocated the FC adapter to a different bus and immediately saw 40% improvement in the throughput of the adapter.
David R. Nicholson
