•TSM LAN free backups

Why would you want to use LAN free? Generally speaking, backing up and restoring
over a SAN is much faster that over a LAN, but that really depends on how fast
those two items are in your site. Anothe r benefit for traditional TSM is that LA
N free avoids clogging up backup disk pools with large backups, as this uses a f
ront end disk pool that is offloaded to tape each day. LAN free is also very sui
table for big databases. However many TSM installations do not use tape, or they
may use active copy storage pools. So LAN free is not an automatic choice, you
need to study the costs and the benefits to see if it will fit into your site. A
lso, tape drives are finite resource and too much LAN free will quickly use them
up.
Assuming you decide to install LAN free, this is how you would do it on AIX.

Connecting the Tape Drives

First you need to organise cabling up your tape drives. If your backups are crit
ical you will need two fiber cards installed in each client for resilience. Then
you need them cabled up to your SAN switches and zoned in so your client can ac
ccess the tape drives. It is possible to rename your tape drives to something mo
re meaningful that the rmtnn names that UNIX provides by default, but to do that
you need to install an Atape driver, supplied free by IBM. Once you do this, yo
u rename the drives with smitty, or with the chdev command as below. It is best
to give your drives a name that contains the WWWN then they are unique. When you
rename them, several files will be created in the /dev directory. The device pa
rameter in your path name in TSM must match these names. The chdev command in fu
ll is:

chdev -l rmt0 -a new_name=T_AA02450

Defining the Storage Agent

Define at the TSM Server

Use a comand like the one below to define a storage agent to the TSM server. If
you want to look at existing storage agents to see how they are defined, you wil
l find them by using the 'q server' command or the 'other servers' tab in the GU
I.

define server nnnnn serverpassword=password hla=x.xx.xx.xx lla=xxxx

nnnnn is the name of the storage agent. Each agent name needs to be unique, so c
ome up with a good naming standard. A simple standard that works is nodename_age
nt.

password is the password for the storage agent and must match the password suppl
ied in the client definition below

xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip address (or DNS entry) of the client machine

xxxx is the port you use in the dsm.sys for the storage agent. The example below
uses 1510.

define the tape paths

To define the tape paths to the TSM server, use commands like

define path agent.name tape.name SRCT=server destt=drive library=LIBNAME device

=/dev/tape_name