We at UF are galloping in the VM direction, and I'm dissatisfied with
TSM's solutions in this space.  Virtualization offers profound
simplifying abstractions, and I am beginning to feel I'm losing ground
because I can't take advantage of them.


With backup-oriented deduped storage devices rattling around, the
advantages of progressive backups get weaker. Sending images to a
share, which is then deduped, leaves you with many of the advantages
of incrementals-forever, and is drastically simpler.

You pay in performance, to be sure: image fulls all the time are no
chicken feed.  Is the simplicity worth it?  I'm not sure; but I'm
definitely looking.

And the vendors are working on dedupe-aware clients.  When they get
the second "Full image backup" only taking up the network of an
incr...


I've been content with "No Bare Metal Restore" out of TSM for a
decade.  "Well, TSM serves many platforms, and the intricacies of BMR
on all of them makes it impossible to make consistent service
offerings.  That fragmented market is better served by apps that serve
the various platforms."  Sensible: a BMR suite to serve Novell,
Solaris, AIX, Windows, I-series?

But now it's just an image.  All you need to do is shake hands with
the guest to ensure a consistency point, snapshot, and whoosh.


How does one balance the flexibility of TSM's nuanced understanding of
a filesystem with the simplicity of having the whole filesystem just
there, to mount?

Never ever ever having to manage a a TSM database again, because it's
shut up inside the dedupe appliance?


So can I get a testimony?  My faith is wavering here: tell me how
you're serving VM customers and thrilled with it.  I could really use
some recipies.



- Allen S. Rout