ONTAP Discussions

TSM primary disk pools on FAS

dammers
5,814 Views

Does any of you have customer examples of deploying TSM primary disk pools on NetApp FAS systems?

(So, not secundary copy pools on VTL).

Thx.

Robin

5 REPLIES 5

amiller_1
5,814 Views

Yep -- works very, very well actually. Incredibly fast restores, reclamation is fine (smaller volumes are better), and TSM even has some optimized stuff around disk-based SEQUENTIAL volumes.

I was actually originally involved in a rollout almost 4 years ago (was a customer at the time) using TSM 5.3 and an FC direct-connected NearStore R200 with 320 GB SATA disks for the primary disk pool. We already had a FAS960 at the time (used solely for iSCSI for a while) and were very happy with NetApp core technologies around data protection (RAID DP, rebuild times, WAFL scrubbing/checksumming/etc.) and the price was doable using SATA disks (brand new at the time).

Tivoli's incremental forever methodology was what made the disk cost affordable as well (backup deduplication wasn't really out there at the time and we'd been running TSM for 2 years with tape). Once we were done, the backups each night flowed into a 500 GB or so RANDOM pool first (just local RAID disk on the TSM server) which had a very low migration threshold to force migration over to the R200 which had thousands of 10 GB SEQUENTIAL FILE volumes (scripts to define all those volume of course). Backups were cut off at 5 AM for morning processing which involved a copy storage pool from the R200 primary pool to two tape storage pools (with 5.4 (or maybe it was 5.5 😉 the 2 "copy storage pool" operations could run simultaneously which helped with morning processing). The vaulting was actually handled by an addon product called TSMManager (tsmmanager.us) which also is much nicer to use for day to day work plus gives a lot of historical information for free basically (hardly any setup needed).

About 9 months ago (shortly before starting my current job as a VAR systems engineer), along with updating from 5.3 to 5.5 we overhauled from a single R200 to (2) 3040's -- one with the disk from the R200 and the second with 1 TB disks in a remote location (1 mile away) connected via private fiber (using 2 FC switches to use the long-haul fibre between the 2 locations).

Here's the first presentation that really got us going on this...

http://tsm-symposium.oucs.ox.ac.uk/2005/papers/Understanding%20Disk%20Storage%20in%20TSM%20(Dave%20Cannon).pdf



Updated version of that presentation here....

http://tsm-symposium.oucs.ox.ac.uk/2007/papers/Dave%20Cannon%20-%20Understanding%20Disk%20Storage.pdf



Tivoli is fun stuff....definitely not a "backup system" but more of a "backup/archive framework" that you can build your life into with incredible flexibility (most recently proved again to me watching my former coworkers do pool migrations from all SDLT to LTO4....smooth as silk).

Come Tivoli 6 the link below covers a VERY exciting possibility....snapshots, NDMP & TSM working together.

http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2009/02/19/goodbye-backup-agentsgoodbye-vcb/

I could ramble for a while longer....but think this is long enough.



amiller_1
5,814 Views

And...I'd be curious to hear what you do with this/how well it works for you....

dammers
5,814 Views

Hi Andrew,

We are still working on this and your message was very helpful. If we convince the customer, I owe you at least a T-shirt 🙂

Meanwhile I also had contact with a IBM collegue to get more details on te Snap integration with TSM.

Especially the SnapDiff integration will be very helpfull for fast back-up and off course fast restores.

This will get a new back-up type within te TSM GUI, called Incremental Snapshot Difference.

Cheers,

Robin

amiller_1
5,814 Views

Great -- glad to hear it was helpful. If it does work out, I'll take you up on the T-Shirt.

I'd be interested to hear further details as/if they're available....this is fun stuff.

Feel free to call/email/etc. if any other questions or items.

PIYUSHBANSAL198722
5,683 Views

Hi,

 

Information is really helpfull.

We have two luns for TSM one for the disk storage primary pool and the another one is for the transaction logs. Currently both of them are thick provisioned.

 

Please suggest How good TSM work when the lun is thin-provisioned ?? or what effect would be there on TSM when these luns are thin-provisioned.

 

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