We have had a couple of customers over the years running TSM on Solaris. I must echo Mike's comments. As Solaris would optimistically finish third in IBMs race for resources there will necessarily be fewer resources both on the development and support side. If/when there are problems they will be solved more slowly than on the Windows or AIX. I guess I would enter the TSM on Solaris world with caution. That said, I have found that if you are a very good Solaris person, the issues are much easier to solve as you can often walk the IBM resource through the problem. But it will take more of your time if there is a problem.
The most prevalent issues we have seen are integrating with libraries and drives as you would expect. Perhaps if you stay with IBM tape products these problems would be less? Who knows. Kelly Lipp CTO STORServer, Inc. 485-B Elkton Drive Colorado Springs, CO 80907 719-266-8777 x7105 www.storserver.com -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of De Gasperis, Mike Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 9:09 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Preferred TSM Platform We're primarily a Solaris based TSM shop, our backup server platforms are T2000's and T5220's currently which seem to be very good at handling the I/O of the newer T10000A & B drives along with the speeds of LTO's and what not. Most of our servers are loaded up with dual port 4Gb Emulex cards usually eight total HBA ports per server. Network wise we use the onboard 4 Gb ports and usually a dual port Gb card and Etherchannel/trunking to give us a large pipe for backup traffic. Speed wise the machines are great for an enterprise solution, price wise I think they're fantastic as well. The only issues we seem to run in to is IBM & Solaris pointing fingers at each other when there are complicated bugs encountered that can be resolved via simple queries to get to the root of the problem. We're primarily using SAN based storage SUN/EMC arrays along with EDL's, disk suite management is usually done with Veritas for us though mpxio is always an option. For any disk we use in TSM we typically use raw volumes and not formatted file systems. I think the preferred platform is still AIX as TSM just seems to perform better on it with less of these odd bugs we see from time to time. The new Sun servers though are a great buy performance wise and really do handle these newer tape drive speeds well. Most of these new servers we're using we can't even get the CPU usage to go above 40% yet with 400-500 clients on them. -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Sergio Fuentes Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 10:58 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Preferred TSM Platform We're actually considering a new platform for future TSM servers simply because we're not an AIX shop anymore (TSM being the lone holdout). We're not a very good windows shop either, and our strength is really in Solaris and/or Linux, technically speaking. When I compare the hardware and LVM features for Solaris with those of Linux, I can see the benefits of Solaris. But this listserv group has me second-guessing myself since I have yet to hear from someone with a Solaris-based TSM infrastructure. (I would stick with AIX if I could, but you know... politics). Solaris 10 and the built-in features of ZFS alone have kind of swayed me towards Solaris. It's the only native LVM-based filesystem that I think can compete with what I'm used to, namely JFS2. As for hardware, Sun offers some pretty hefty I/O-centric boxes, with a hefty pricetag. But the pricey p650 that we're on now has lasted almost 7 years, is still very stable and not breaking much of a sweat. Still, the range of servers that Sun offers (which I don't see in the Dell world) is another advantage. Any thoughts from anyone running a TSM server on Solaris? We could use the insight since I believe we'll be rolling out a development environment on Solaris as a proof-of-concept. Anyone familiar with DB2 performance on Solaris? Thanks! SF Jim Zajkowski wrote: > On Feb 25, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Strand, Neil B. wrote: > >> consider Solaris > > Actually I'm considering replacing my Linux TSM server with Solaris - > either SPARC or x86 - predominately because Solaris has a fast TCP/IP > stack, ZFS, and fewer driver issues than on Linux. Has anyone also > moved from Linux to Solaris? > > --Jim
