My employer is in the early stages of planning for a move to a pair of data centers. We are planning to have a TSM server at each data center, with each server writing copy pool tapes on drives located at the other data center. The TSM servers will run under either mainframe Linux or AIX; we are still looking at the costs of the two options. We have not picked physical locations yet, but our selection criteria will probably lead to a distance between data centers somewhere in the tens of kilometers.
I am aware of four options for extending FCP tape drive connections over distances in this range: FCP over dedicated fibre, FCP over shared fibre with wave division multiplexing, iFCP, and FCIP. I gather that there are TSM sites with remote tape drives. Does their experience offer strong reasons to favor or avoid particular options?
