Bryan,
When you ask a TSM forum to recommend some alternative to TSM, that
is sort of like asking a devoutly religious man to recommend some
religion that is better than his. :-) What kind of answer do you really
expect to get?
One alternative to TSM that hasn't been mentioned yet is Avamar, a
deduplication appliance sold by EMC. I don't work for EMC, or a company
who sells EMC products, so this is not a shrouded sales pitch. Last year
I led our TSM Team in a proof-of-concept of Avamar, so that is the only
reason I know about it. We are not running it in production today, so I
am not expert in my opinion. The reason we looked at Avamar was because
our management was disgruntled about a TSM license audit we had to
endure.
Avamar is a disk-only solution, so you will need enough disk space
for your entire backup set, because you can't migrate data to tape. But
because it is deduplicating the data on the way in, it requires only a
fraction of the disk space. For regular filesystem type data, sometimes
it is only 1/20th as much disk; for database data it may be much less;
for image data it might not deduplicate much at all. If you are backing
up VMs, where many of them were built from the same image, the
deduplication may be like 1/100th as much disk. So the kind of data you
are backing up has a lot to do with how well it deduplicates. EMC has
some tools to help size your solution.
Most deduplication appliances work like a network share or a VTL, so
you have to have a regular backup product in front of them to feed them
data. But Avamar provides it's own clients that run on the servers you
are backing up. They also have all the special clients you need to
backup databases, etc. That is the thing that made me want to look at
Avamar at all. We weren't going to have to pay for TSM licenses, then
also pay for the deduplication applicance and all the hardware and
software maintencance for all that, too.
The company I work for did a proof-of-concept of Avamar, as I said.
We spent months and tested Windows, Linux, AIX, SQL, Oracle and Exchange
clients and they all worked like we expected them to. We didn't run
into any problems with how the appliance worked. We also tested the
automated replication from one appliance to another appliance about 3
hours away, and that worked well, too. We have not purchased yet, but
only because of budget reasons. We liked the product and will pull the
trigger as soon as money becomes available. In our situation, the cost
of purchasing Avamar new was higher than paying maintenance on TSM
licenses.
The licensing scheme for Avamar is totally simple, too. You pay for
the capacity of Avamar disk space you buy. That is it. The more
drawers of space you buy, the higher the price. There is no charge for
any of the client software agents, and it doesn't matter how many
servers you are backing up, or how big they are. That is all built in
to the capacity pricing. That is another reason I like Avamar. They
have kept that part extremely simple.
One thing about Avamar is that the reporting is weak. They give you
basic reports, but they aren't pretty. If you want pretty, you will
have to buy an add-on product like EMC Data Protection Manager, which
has a lot of features, but will jack up the price.
Best Regards,
John D. Schneider
Cell: (314) 750-8721
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs
From: woodbm <tsm-fo...@backupcentral.com>
Date: Wed, December 30, 2009 1:11 pm
To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU
Hello all,
I have been tasked with looking at alternatives to TSM due to recent
Audit from IBM and the amount of money we just shelled out for the TSM
License. I am sure most of you have pertaken to this wonderful
experience. I don't really want to move away from TSM, but have to
provide alternatives to management. Could anyone direct me to where I
can begin my search. I have only used TSM my entire time here. What is
the industry leader? Any info or documents or links doing a comparison
would be helpful. Also, is the license structure the same for other
environments as well or is IBM way out of line? I am going to start with
EMC's Avamar/Networker.
Thanks much,
Bryan
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