Hello Bryan, 

This is an interesting topic. Here are several thoughts and questions. 

Licensing for NetBackup is also based on the class of the server and the class 
of the clients. 
The pricing keeps changing as some things that used to have a separate optional 
cost are merged into the base cost. 
As Both IBM and Symantec like to use 3rd party sellers it might also be 
interesting to find the best price. 

EMC's Avamar and Symantec's Pure disk are a little bit more like TSM in that 
they only do incremental backups. They take this a bit further alone then TSM 
in that they do block or segment incremental backups. They are a little 
different in that the block/segment is single instance across all backup 
clients covered by a backup server.  I wonder if IBM is going to add this 
feature. Note this is not media or storage pool dedupe which Avamar, Pure disk 
and TSM support. 
They are also like TSM in that they require a data base to hold the meta-data. 
But different in that they hold the data blocks/segments also. This makes 
things interesting in that as far as I can tell a full backup of the backup 
server is not possible other than by replication. This make things interesting 
if one worries about backup server database corruption due to a software bug. 
I believe that comm vault also supports this backup model. But they are a 
little bit different in that they will move the data from the backup server to 
tape in the dedupe format, where the others reconstitute the deduped data 
before writing the data to tape. 

I am not sure if Syncsort and FDR also play in this game. 

In the Microsoft only world, Microsoft now sells a vss based product that works 
on windows and windows data base products including Exchange and Sharepoint. 
The last I heard they do not support other products such as Oracle DB and IBM 
DB/2. 

One could also look at hardware solutions from vendors such as data domain and 
netapp for many of one's backup needs. 

Not as full featured as the above products, has anyone been looking at the open 
sourced products?

len



 


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
woodbm
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 2:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs

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

+----------------------------------------------------------------------
|This was sent by woodbm AT nu DOT com via Backup Central.
|Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------