We have different areas of responsibility here with TSM.  The help desk
people set up the save's of the clients and the servers.  They also
perform any restores, as needed.  The operations gal and I are to make
sure that we can recover the TSM server in case of drastic damage to it.

We did have a consultant come in and spend a few days.  Mostly with the
operations gal and I.  In the slack time he helped the help desk with some
issues they had.
Primary mission of this consultants visit was to help the operations gal
and I with getting the TSM saves set up.
First few hours were spent in front of a whiteboard with the consultant
questioning us how we wanted to do this.  We did NOT want to have any of
the client and/or server data being rotated from disk storage pools to
tape storage pools.  No archival, etc.  The help desk people would never
have to ask us to get a tape or have one from some tape library
automatically mounted to restore any data to a client or server.  Repeat,
the use of tape was just in case damage occurred to the TSM server itself.

We have two weeks of tapes - week 1 and week 2.  Week one starts the
backup stg backuppool lto_3581_week#
on Sunday afternoon on 'fresh' tapes. And then these are moved offsite.
That takes 4.02 3581 tapes. Then Monday-Thursday night's backup (same
command) take less than a tape each night.  The next morning, each tape is
moved to offsite storage.  We also run the
backup db devclass=3581dev type=full scratch=yes wait=no
on a daily basis and send that tape offsite as well.

Starting on Friday we blank out the previous weeks tapes and start over.

As far as training here goes, it can be pretty good at times.  For a year
or two it was locked down tight but it's pretty much back to normal again.
 I manage to get offsite to a conference about every other year.

My other duties, like many of you, are numerous.  Domino/Notes
administrator, iSeries administrator (we have four of them.  Some of you
may know them by other names:  AS/400's, i5's, etc), and so on.  And I
cover for the operations gal who left for two weeks in Hawaii just a week
after the consultant left.

Rob Berendt
--
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
PO Box 2000
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com