>...I've been told by another competitor's
>marketing rep that TSM restore time takes forever.

It *can* take "forever" - but only if you want it to...
What that competing vendor didn't want to tell you is that
TSM provides a spectrum of choices for your backup/restore
configuration: you choose based upon economics and the
type of recoveries you expect to encounter.  At the "low"
end of the scale you can use no collocation and write to
tape as cheap as 8mm, using "incremental forever": that
provides for miscellaneous file recoveries at minimal cost.
At the high end of the spectrum you can use high-performance
tape drives, collocate by file system, perform full backups
every time, and make portable backup sets which you can
restore wholly using client hardware.

How you back up is dictated by your restoral objectives.
As another posting said, in modern systems you don't want to
depend upon a batch-oriented recovery of a disk: you instead
use redundant hardware, mirroring, and snapshots to keep your
e-business running with minimal outages and transaction loss.
TSM is probably best regarded as your surity copy of your
data...your guarantee of having images that you can depend
upon when you eventually discover that files have been
corrupted, erased files need to be restored, and historical
investigations have to be performed.  If you trace through
the TSM Technical Guide redbooks, you'll see how the product
is evolving (subfile backup et al) to meaningfully compare
with that competing vendor's offering.

Make sure that your business has firmly defined objectives
when it goes to compare storage management products: don't
simply look at packages and compare them.  You want a
solution which will fulfill defined needs, not a vendor's
sale objectives.

  Richard Sims, BU