Greetings, This will seem like an odd question, but can anybody tell me how to calculate the relative impact of tape drives on the performance of the TSM server? With real tape drives, a TSM server (in my case, AIX) doesn't have to worry about large numbers of real drives, because it would be cost prohibitive to have 50 or 60 real tape drives on a single TSM server. But now that there are virtual tape products, like the Clariion Disk Library, that allow you to drive a large number, can the resources on the TSM server prevent you from having large numbers of virtual tape drives? I have on customer with 64 virtual LTO2 drives on a single AIX TSM server (a 8-way 6M2 with 16GB memory), and it seems to be able to use them all simultaneously without running into any limitations, except for the speed of the incoming data, which is limited to the size of the incoming two Gig-E networks sending the data. But I have another customer who believes they need 200 virtual drives, and that all of them will be working at once. They have that many simultaneous client sessions going to disk pool, but they would like to drive straight to CDL virtual tapes, and eliminate the disk pool. Does anyone see a problem with that?
Best Regards, John D. Schneider Technology Consultant