Tab, I second EVERYTHING that was said about preferring AIX! That being said, I have multiple Windows servers where the load isn't high enough to justify AIX.
The largest has about 150 TSM clients, mostly file servers; we back up on average, 80-100GB nightly. Using raw disks, mirrored, for a 33GB TSM data base. Pentium III Xeon 900Mhz, 4-way, Win2K3 SP1. Works just fine, because we use the standard setup: Clients back up to 100GB disk pool, stuff migrates out to the tape pool as needed, tapes are copied around 4 in the morning. Everything is generally done in about 6 hours, and we don't have any real tight timelines to worry about. What we DON'T have: No LARGE data bases backing up where we need to worry about pushing 100's of GB from one host. It's all relatively small stuff, and I/O speed isn't a big priority. We are replacing the host later this year because of age; the next machine will be faster but a 2-way. Haven't seen any benefit to the 4-way; backups aren't very CPU-consuming. For 200 GB per day, a recent-model Windows host will handle the CPU load just fine. For you, the issue will be I/O, not CPU. Now where I REALLY dislike Windows: I've talked with people from Tivoli and from Microsoft and from SHARE; there is NO instrumentation in Windows that will let you monitor what is going on over a non-disk I/O bus. You hook tape to a Windows host, and it's a mystery what happens. When I'm doing tape-to-tape operations, I can't tell WHERE the bottleneck is. I don't have a really good notion of how much data you can push through a Windows box, given you have multiple HBA's/SCSI connections, but there is only 1 or 2 internal buses. I can't tell how much memory is being used for the TAPE I/O buffers, or if that is an issue. As such I think it's harder to configure a Windows box good throughput with multiple non-disk I/O devices. If you are going to have problems, it will be with trying to connect 12 SCSI drives with only 4 SCSI cards, and that interesting item "Semi-annual exports in the 2-5 TB range". If you have time constraints in producing that EXPORT, than I/O speed is more important to you than it is in my environment. Wanda Prather "I/O, I/O, It's all about I/O" -(me) Wanda -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tab Trepagnier Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:14 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Platform change to Windows? We are considering migrating our TSM systems from AIX to Windows 2003. I know that the experience of the forum participants is that AIX provides superior I/O performance, but where is that threshold? These are our system details. I'd like for anyone with experience with a system of similar size to share their experiences regarding Unix vs. Windows. We are currently running TSM 5.1.10 on a 2-way 6H1 with 4 GB RAM. We are considering running TSM 5.3.2 on a 2-way or 4-way 3.0 GHz Xeon with 4 GB RAM. All non-OS I/O would be via GigE network and redundant 2 Gbs fiber. TSM system details: DB: 32 GB @ 83% utilization Log: 5 GB, roll-forward mode Primary data: 16 TB with one copypool (another 16 TB to manage) Nodes: 175 backing up during a 10-hour window Average daily incoming data: ~ 200 GB; may be reduced via deployment of TDP Oracle Disk: 1 TB DAS, 3 TB SAN Tape: LTO-1, DLT8000, 3570XL, four SCSI drives each; libraries will be consolidated Daily copypool updates sent to vault Semi-annual exports in the 2-5 TB range Does that sound like a system that could reasonably be hosted on a modern Windows system? Is a 2-way adequate, or should we get a 4-way? Thanks in advance. Tab Trepagnier TSM Administrator Laitram, L.L.C.
