For someone who has used Symantec, Veritas, CA, & HP Backup, making the transition to TSM was a pretty easy one for me. I have a pretty strong background with command line from my Cisco background making it that much easier to use. For those of you that don't have a strong yearning for command line and like the GUI, fear not; IBM does have an Integrated Solutions Console which only runs in Windows. For all of you strong command liners out there, TSM is a no brainer.
Running TSM on a platform that fits your line of business needs is just easy. You can choose so many flavors of OS including Windows, AIX, Linux, etc. There is an entire laundry list of compatible hard so it's pretty much a guarantee that TSM will attach to it. Although it never hurts to check: http://www-306.ibm.c...ageManager.html
Whether it be a single tape drive library all the way up to hundreds of drives or silos, TSM is the way to go for industry's most tested and tried DR software. Using the storage pools for both on and off site backup only further enable your ability to not only rapidly recover small files from user error, but to recover from a disaster of epic proportions.
Just to give an example without giving away all of my secrets, I work for the State of North Dakota. Housed in Bismarck, we have our large data center where 95% of our hardware is located. The TSM servers, tape library, and storage pools sit across the Missouri River 10 miles away in another data center connected via 10Gbps fiber.
Of course you have to gauge these needs based on your geographic location. Here in North Dakota, we have to worry about tornadoes and on the even rarer occasion, a possible 100 year flood.
Another great advantage of TSM is it's sheer security. If you don't have a copy of the database, a lost tape is completely useless to it's finder. There is no catalog information stored on the tapes, only raw data.
Of course this leads us to the 2 biggest disadvantages:
Guard your TSM database with your life. Have 3 copies of it AT ALL TIMES! If you loose your database, you don't restore, EVER!
Another huge disadvantage is the sheer administration fact. While TSM has many dedicated and automated tasks built in, it still takes a full time administrator. You can't expect to just push the TSM server into the corner and never touch it again. You must continually work at it, monitor it, etc.
And for those out there interested in purchasing TSM, Version 6 with DB2 support is due out late 08/early 09
Giving you a basic overview & review of TSM was indeed my pleasure today and if you have any questions about TSM, please email me: paul_schumacher@hotmail.com Happy Blogging! Pauly "San Man" Links:
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
This post was pulled off of BoredSysAdmin's Blog http://boredsysadm.blogspot.com/ (originally posted yesterday by me!) with Blake's permission through Serge who I know from Eve-Online
