On 2 Aug 2002 at 4:16, Rafael Mendez wrote:

> Hi,
> In my opinion (I have used Legato and TSM not Veritas) each storage
> product has its advantages and disadvantages.

I have also used both . . .

>Legato is easy to
> install and configure

Very easy!  The first time I downloaded the demo to try it out, I had
it running, doing client backups, with full jukebox support within 1
hour.  I was very impressed.

IBM could sure take a few lessons from Legato on how to
install/configure jukeboxes.

> but when you have very new devices, Legato is
> not the best. Also, i do not trust in Legato support.

My experience is that their support was the very worse I've ever
experienced.  This also includes extremely buggy/untested sftw
releases.

Now to be fair, this was several years ago.  My understanding is that
things are somewhat better today.  There is a Legato mailing list -
check there.

>
> TSM is in my opinion the most powerful storage software but is hard to
> understand how it works.  You need to study very much and sometimes
> TSM require too much effort.

TSM is also very resource intensive, requiring lots of processor
power, fast disk accesss for the db, very large database, and the big
disk staging pools.

>
> Legato could be installed over a small network(for that reason you
> have three different versions of Legato Server) but I do not think is
> a good idea to install TSM if you have small network.

I found Legato to be good up to around 50-100 clients.  Around 100
clients, manually balancing the client schedules became a mess.

TSM is deep and complex, but for this you get a lot.  It can do just
about anything you want and do it well - you just have to give it the
resources it wants.  The worse mistake to make with TSM is to not
give it the resources it needs to run well.

> So, this is just my point of view and I am concious that many people
> could disagree with me.
>

My opinion . . . .

We ran Legato for 4-5 years.  It served us well during that time,
even with all the problems we had with buggy sftw and bad support.
Our decision to switch to TSM was NOT because of these issues.  Even
with all the problems it wouldn't have been possible to justify the
dollars to switch.  Ultimately, the switch was justified because we
out grew Legato.  It simply couldn't do some of the things we needed.

We are VERY happy with TSM.  It's anything but perfect, but it does
what we need better than anything else.

Rick