Great Comments!
I've often wondered if IBM appreciates just how complicated TSM is.
We had a big discussion the other day about would we recommend TSM to other
possible customers.
The answer we a very qualified "yes". We really like TSM for its core feature
- incremental forever backup system. It saved our posteriors years ago when we
were drowning in periodic full backups, especially from remote sites. But the
tradeoff is learning/maintaining a very complicated program that requires lots
of resources. Roger below mentions policies. To this day, after working with
TSM for many years (since TSM v3.7), if the topic of policies comes up I have
to look up and refresh my memory of what they are and how they interact. And
then, try and explain them to a user/manager/auditor/whomever.
The Admin Guide is the best document I know of for how TSM fits together - how
to get your head around TSM. No other documentation comes close. Losing it
would be a big loss.
Sometimes when we talk we wonder if the folks who develop and support TSM (and
most products today from all vendors) actually use their own products like we
use them. If all they had to learn/use TSM was the standard documentation, I
wonder how far they would get. This is why this mailing list is SO great!
Rick
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Roger Deschner
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 11:06 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Bring back TSM Administrator's Guide
Thank you for your response Clare. It's good to know these comments are
being read.
There are a large number of areas that cannot be covered separately. A
very large topic is Policy, which is one of Spectrum Protect's hardest
to understand areas, yet it affects and is affected by everything else.
For instance, it has been essential to understand Policy in crafting our
hybrid D2D2D2T solution. Or when the auditor came and said we needed to
keep just a certain set of files for five years. The Admin Guide covered
Policy well enough that you could make your way through its many
complexities and get it to work for you. But to cover Policy adequately,
it had to refer to many other areas of the book.
Policy is just one example, which really needs everything else in the
book, in order to explain it well enough. But it needs to all be in one
place. I carry 4 PDFs (Admin Guide, Admin Ref, Windows Client, Unix
Client) around on a USB stick so I can refer to them wherever I am and
whatever the network is there.
Another topic that the solution guides simply do not cover, is the
complex interrelationships between storage pools of different kinds -
tape, VTL, disk, file, optical, etc, and how to structure migration,
reclamation, collocation, and storage pool backup to make the data flow
among them the way you want.
There's sveral other topics of similar complexity, such as managing the
client scheduler, and how to build a daily schedule of server
activities.
There are of course specialized topics that shouldn't be in there. You
mentioned NDMP. Another is V5 to V6/7 migration. Virtual Machines could
be its own book.
The basic issue here is that, as the sophisticated and fully evolved
"best of breed", Spectrum Protect has a rather steep learning curve. It
always has, since it was WDSF. After 20 years with WDSF/ADSM/TSM/SP I am
still learning things, and I still refer to the Admin Guide frequently.
Doing away with its best documentation can only hurt this highly
sophisticated product. Coherent how-to knowledge is the essential weapon
in the face of complexity. Without the Administrator's Guide, more will
simply declare Spectrum Protect to be "too complicated to understand",
and settle for an inferior solution that is easier to understand. It's a
battle that those of us who know the product well, constantly fight,
which is why this book is so essential to the product.
Roger Deschner University of Illinois at Chicago rogerd AT uic DOT edu
======I have not lost my mind -- it is backed up on tape somewhere.=====
On Tue, 15 Dec 2015, J. Pohlmann wrote:
>Hi Clare. The Admin Guide provided a one-stop shopping approach to all
>functional areas of Spectrum Protect. I think this is what's missing from
>the current documentation. Clearly the Admin Guide was aimed at an
>experienced person as opposed to a novice. In an initial Spectrum Protect
>implementation, the Solutions Guides are of value. However they fall short
>in supplying guidance and "how-to" or "setup" information to an existing
>installation. So, even though the Admin Guide became bigger over the
>releases, the topics are still of extreme value. For example tape is still
>aa viable media, especially in the light of LTO 7 technology. It fits into
>large to very large enterprises, yet when it comes to media management of
>disaster protection implementation, we have no guidance in the new
>publications. So, I would vote for the return of the Admin Guide, it still
>is the best collection of implementation and usage guidance for all the
>various Spectrum Protect aspects. I would prefer one book to a large set of
>publications that are topic oriented.
>
>Best regards,
>Joerg Pohlmann
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
>Clare Byrne
>Sent: December 15, 2015 13:59
>To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
>Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Bring back TSM Administrator's Guide
>
>Please be assured that we in IBM development are listening and are
>discussing future actions regarding the Administrator's Guide content since
>the feedback about the 7.1.3 release that did not include that book.
>I gave some information in a response to that earlier feedback:
>http://www.mail-archive.com/adsm-l AT vm.marist DOT edu/msg99286.html
>
>We are working on a plan to publish a solution guide for the disk-to-tape
>architecture next. This should fill in some gaps left by the removal of the
>Administrator's Guide. Timing of the publication is yet to be determined.
>
>We are also discussing how to fill the information needs for those who will
>not be using one of the four documented architectures. We already point to
>the 7.1.1 guides from newer releases but we realize this is not ideal.
>Possible actions include creating additional, supplemental information
>outside of the solution guides, similar to what we have done for the
>information about NDMP (
>http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGSG7_7.1.4/srv.admin/r_ndmp.htm
>l
>).
>
>What are the most important subjects from the old Administrator's Guide for
>us to consider? Knowing more specifics about your priorities would be very
>helpful to us for setting our priorities and plans. Web traffic for the
>content on IBM Knowledge Center gives us some information but not a complete
>picture of needs.
>
>Meanwhile, to make the 7.1.1 Administrator's Guide PDFs easier to find and
>download, today we added the five English PDFs to the Tivoli Storage Manager
>wiki. Find the links to them on this page:
>https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivol
>i%20Storage%20Manager/page/Version%207.1.1%20PDF%20files%20of%20IBM%20Tivoli
>%20Storage%20Manager%20documentation
>
>The 7.1.1 Administrator's Guide PDFs are also still available in the
>711_411_PDFs.zip file that you can find at
>ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/products/TSM/current/
>The available translations are in the 711_411_PDFs_nl.zip file in the same
>directory. All this content (English and other languages) remains available
>online in IBM Knowledge Center at
>http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGSG7_7.1.1/com.ibm.itsm.srv.com
>mon.doc/t_server_main.html
>
>PDFs for previous releases, including several unsupported levels, are also
>still available. Start on this page:
>https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivol
>i%20Storage%20Manager/page/PDF%20documentation
>
>(Note: This wiki was unavailable for several days, starting on 11 December.
>While the wiki is available again, restoration of some pages and links is
>still in progress. Unfortunately you might find some links that don't work,
>especially for the unsupported releases. I don't know the projected date for
>completion.)
>
>Clare Byrne
>Information Development for IBM Spectrum Protect Tucson, AZ US
>
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