Organization: Samford University Computer Services
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.sfs-l
Date:         Mon, 13 Apr 1992 09:45:20 CDT
From:         Galen Tillery <RGTILLER@SAMFORD.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: SFS Questions

On Wed, 8 Apr 1992 15:07:11 MST Theresa Duttle said:
>....I would like to get
>some information on how other sites migrated to SFS, how they
>organized their filepools, and so on. Being a university, we are
>especially interested in the experience of other universities.
>
>Specific Questions:
>How did you set up your filepools (i.e., divide up your users), and
>    what were the considerations involved in your choices? (E.g.,
>    performance, administration, accessability, etc.) Do you
>    have any estimates on how much DASD space you saved?

I have about 5800 SFS users defined on our system.  I left the 2 IBM
supplied filepools alone and created 2 new ones (EMPLOYEE: and STUDENT:).
The STUDENT: filepool has around 4600 defined users and the employee
filepool has around 1200.  We wanted to keep the students out of the
employee (faculty, staff) filepool for extra security reasons.  I do allow
faculty to have access to the STUDENT: filepool if they need to post
something for their students or have the students place something on
a subdirectory that the faculty person can get to.

I was concerned about performance so I did some testing on typical CMS users.
We have some faculty and staff users who run the FOCUS database product for
ad-hoc reporting from student information files.  FOCUS tends to write large
work/temp files to the user A-disk and SFS was much too slow for this need.
It affected others in the filepool who were trying to do work also so I
decided to give real mdisks to anyone who was doing a large amount of
dasd I/O (before people freak... These users are BIG HITTERS!  A few
use a particular FOCUS VSAM dataset so heavily that it consistently shows
up as being the hardest hit disk area on the system.. All of VM, and VSE/ESA
included.

These heavy uses do have access to the SFS for keeping up with their own
Email, notebooks, etc. (although most don't).

Since the SFS is used here primarily to hold Email and some small programs,
performance is not an issue as in overloading the filepool data disks.

>
>How long did it take to migrate the different user groups to SFS?
>    What kinds of problems did you (& your users) encounter?

I was fortunate enough to be able to start most CMS users out on SFS.
To calculate your migration time... Make an estimate of how long it would
take to copy a user's files from one mdisk to another and then do any
directory cleanup...
>
>Is anyone using VMBACKUP (full+incremental) to back up SFS files?
>    How do you handle disaster recovery (say, you have an HDA conk
>    out on a vol containing control mdisks &/or catalogs)?
We use VMBACKUP/VMTAPE very successfully for full and incremental backups.
As far as disaster recover is concerned.  Since we have everything
in VMBACKUP, we would just redefine the pools and re-load the data from
VMBACKUP.

>
>Do you have some/all software packages in SFS? How is it set up?
>    Separate filepool? (Maybe VMSYS?) Do you have each package
>    (SAS, COBOL, GDDM, etc.) in a different directory? How do
>    the users access the packages - do you have some kind of
>    cover exec(s) that sets up the access for the user?
Because I was unsure how much the program product mdisks would be used,
I went ahead and installed all of them on their own mdisks.
>

Hope this helps.... Galen.

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||> R. Galen Tillery             |  S a m f o r d     U n i v e r s i t y <||
||> Manager - Technical Support  |  Birmingham, Alabama  USA              <||
||> Whitewater Enthusiast!       |  Computer & Telecommunication Services <||
||> INFOREP  (RGTILLER@SAMFORD)  |  Brooks Hall - 322                     <||
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.sfs-l