Well,

The contracts have now been signed and I can speak freely.

I'm looking to push TSM to as many sites as possible in our vast distributed 
network.  Those that I can't service with TSM will come to appreciate the 
qualities of Backup Exec.

We will be replacing either Backup Exec or Arcserve in many of the TSM sites, 
and the site managers are used to having the usual GFS arrangement.  They even 
take the occasional monthly backup out of the cycle and keep it forever, 
because this provides a way to appear to comply with ridiculous mandated data 
retention requirements without having to actually think about purge processes, 
application changes and so on.

Thus the reality is that I must provide monthly backup facilities within TSM.  
Many of these sites are quite small, and I'm hoping to get away with 35 days of 
backups on disk, with copypools on a tape that is changed weekly.  THere is no 
way that I can afford one tape per node per month for a backupset.

So, I was  thinking of implementing server-to-server on the one machine so that 
the backupset could be generated to virtual volumes and these stacked on to one 
set of tapes per month.  

I seem to recall seeing a problem with doing that on this list recently, but I 
have been unable to find it there, or anything that is relevant in quickfacts.

Is anyone doing loopback server-to-server, particularly on windows or linux 
servers.  How well does it work?  Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it 
practical to generate backupsets this way.

Any information will be appreciated.  the alternative is two TSM instances in 
every site.


Thanks


Steve Harris
Queensland Health, Brisbane Australia


PS.  If anyone has a Groupwise -> tsm soultion out there, I'm very interested.






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