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Administrator's Guide


Planning for Server Storage

Businesses often back up data to a variety of storage devices ranging from high-performance disk devices to slower and less expensive tape devices. Administrators must balance the data availability requirements of users with the costs of storage devices.

This section discusses how to evaluate your current environment to determine the device classes and storage pools for your server storage.

Evaluating Your Storage Environment

Before configuring devices, evaluate the hardware available to the server:

  1. Determine the storage devices that are available to the server. Determine how many tape drives you have that you will allow the server to use.

    The server expects to have exclusive use of the drives. If another application tries to use a drive used by the server, some server functions may fail.

  2. Determine the Tivoli Storage Manager device type for each of the available devices. Group together similar devices and identify their device classes. For example, create separate categories for 3480 and 3490E cartridge devices.
    Note:
    For sequential access devices, categorize the type of tape cartridge based on capacity. For example, standard cartridge tapes and enhanced capacity cartridge tapes require different device classes.
  3. If you are considering storing data for one Tivoli Storage Manager server using the storage of another Tivoli Storage Manager server (SERVER device type), consider network bandwidth and network traffic. If your network resources constrain your environment, you may have problems using the SERVER device type efficiently.

    Also consider the storage resources available on the target server. Ensure that the target server has enough storage space and mount points to handle the load from the source server.

  4. Categorize storage pools by user requirements. Gather user requirements for data availability. Determine which data needs quick access and which does not.

Mapping Devices to Device Classes

As an example of mapping devices to device classes, assume you have the following devices to use for server storage:

You can map storage devices to device classes as shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Mapping Storage Devices to Device Class

Device Class Description
DISK Storage volumes that reside on DASD

Tivoli Storage Manager provides one DISK device class that is already defined, and you cannot define another device class for disk storage.

CARTRIDGE_E Enhanced Capacity Cartridge System Tape (ECCST) volumes used with 3490E tape devices
CARTRIDGE_B Standard Cartridge System Tape (CST) volumes used with 3480 or 3490 Base tape devices

You must define any device classes that you need for your tape devices. See Chapter 6, Managing Device Classes for information on defining tape device classes to support your physical storage environment.

Mapping Storage Pools to Device Classes and Devices

After you have categorized your storage devices, identify availability, space, and performance requirements for client data that is stored in server storage. These requirements help you determine where to store data for different groups of clients and different types of data. You can then create storage pools that are storage destinations for backed-up, archived, or space-managed files to match requirements.

For example, you determine that users in the business department have three requirements:

To match user requirements to storage devices, the administrator defines storage pools and device classes. See Table 4.

Table 4. Mapping Storage Pools to Device Classes, Libraries, and Drives

Storage Pool Device Class Volume Type Storage Destination
BACKUPPOOL DISK Storage volumes on DASD For a backup copy group for files requiring immediate access
SPACEMGPOOL DISK Storage volumes on DASD For a management class for space-managed files that require immediate access
ARCHTAPEF CARTRIDGE_E ECCST volumes For an archive copy group for files requiring quick, reliable access
BACKTAPE CARTRIDGE_E ECCST volumes For backup copy groups for files not requiring immediate access
ARCHTAPES CARTRIDGE_B CST volumes For archived data not requiring immediate access
Note:
Tivoli Storage Manager has default disk storage pools named BACKUPPOOL, ARCHIVEPOOL, and SPACEMGPOOL. For more information, see Configuring Random Access Volumes on Disk Devices.

Configuring Devices

Before a device can be used by Tivoli Storage Manager, the device must be configured to the operating system as well as to Tivoli Storage Manager. For information on configuring devices, see the following sections:


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