Hello All,

I'm sure that this general question has been asked many times, but every
situation is different. And I can't seem to get to the www.adsm.org site, so
here goes.

We just received some new SSA disks for our TSM servers and I'm looking for
some advice on the best way to lay everything out. Here are the details on
our planned environment (the SSA configuration has not been done yet, so
it's flexible):

Server:
  RS/6000 7026-H70
  4-way processor
  4GB memory
  1 SSA HBA (2 loops)
  AIX 4.3.3 ML 10
  TSM 4.2.2.12
Internal SCSI Storage:
  4 x 9GB (current TSM database/log location)
SSA Loop 1:
  8 x 9GB
  RAID 5
  Approx. 60GB
SSA Loop 2:
  8 x 72GB
  RAID 5
  Approx. 500GB
TSM Database:  Less than 30GB
TSM Log: 3-4GB
Disk Storage Pools: 300GB

My current plan is to put the TSM database on the 9GB SSA drives (using RAID
5, no TSM mirroring), the disk storage pool volumes on the 72GB SSA drives,
and use the internal 9GB drives for database dumps to disk. However, I'm
open to suggestion. Specifically, I am looking for answers to the following:

- Where is the best place for the TSM database log volumes? And if they are
sharing space on the SSA disks, is there any advantage to creating a
separate file system (in general, is there any performance
advantage/disadvantage to multiple file systems on one SSA RAID array)?
- Is there any reason to NOT do RAID 5 on the SSA disks?
- For the database and disk storage volumes, is it better to create more
smaller (2GB) volumes or enable "large file" support and create fewer?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Patrick Varney
Pacific Gas & Electric Company
Fairfield Information Operations Center (FFIOC)
Enterprise Services  Group (ESG), Senior Network Specialist
        *  internal 8-227-2823
        *  external 707-436-2823
        *  pager 707-288-1513