Hi Sergio, I faced the same questions 3 years ago and settled on the products from Nexsan (now owned by Imation) for massive bulk storage.
You can get a 4u 60 drive head unit with 4TB sata disks (the E60 model), and later attach 2 60 drive expansion units to it (the E60X model). I have 3 head units now, not with the configuration above because they are older. 1 unit is direct attached with fiber and the other 2 are san attached. I am planning to convert the direct unit to san attached to facilitate a processor upgrade. There are 2 server instances on the processor sharing the filesystems. The OS is Linux rhel 5. All volumes are scratch allocated. The backups first land on non raid 15k 600GB disks in an Infortrend device. The copypooling is done from there and also the identify processing. Then they are migrated to the Nexsan based storagepools. There is also a tape library. Really big files are excluded from dedup via the stgpool MAXSIZE parameter and land on a separate pool on the Nexsan storage which then migrates to tape. Hope this helps, Bill Colwell Draper Lab -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU] On Behalf Of Sergio O. Fuentes Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 10:32 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: TSM Dedup stgpool target In an earlier thread, I polled this group on whether people recommend going with an array-based dedup solution or doing a TSM dedup solution. Well, the answers came back mixed, obviously with an 'It depends'-type clause. So, moving on... assuming that I'm using TSM dedup, what sort of target arrays are people putting behind their TSM servers. Assume here, also, that you'll be having multiple TSM servers, another backup product, *coughveeam and potentially having to do backup stgpools on the dedup stgpools. I ask because I've been barking up the mid-tier storage array market as our potential disk based backup target simply because of the combination of cost, performance, and scalability. I'd prefer something that is dense I.e. more capacity less footprint and can scale up to 400TB. It seems like vendors get disappointed when you're asking for a 400TB array with just SATA disk simply for backup targets. None of that fancy array intelligence like auto-tiering, large caches, replication, dedup, etc.. is required. Is there another storage market I should be looking at, I.e. really dumb raid arrays, direct attached, NAS, etc... Any feedback is appreciated, even the 'it depends'-type. Thanks! Sergio
