Richard Sims wrote:

> I have to say that I'm getting awfully concerned about the quality of the *SM
> software coming out of Tivoli.  We're encountering one crippling problem after
> another, and administration is being cluttered by a raft of special commands
> and operands to circumvent problems - and sometimes the circumventions
> conflict.  The Tivoli Storage Manager product is going to degenerate into a
> shambles if this continues.  Tivoli *has* to get serious about this and, as
> we've said before:
>   - Do careful design
>   - Conduct code reviews
>   - Do comprehensive testing
>
> TSM is supposed to be the rock-solid vehicle that customers are to depend upon
> to protect their data.  I no longer feel that confident in what is going on
> inside TSM: it's more probabilistic than certain what's going to happen when
> you go to do something with it.  The product as it stands now is an
> embarassment to a company that prides itself on enterprise management and
> certain results.  The architectural problems introduced in v3 (for example, No
> Query Restore) have yet to be resolved, after almost two years.  We've been
> suffering for a year with the archived directories fiasco.  Database recovery
> remains horrendous.  This is a very sad situation.
>

  Just a few weeks ago, we lost the roll forward log (corrupted dont do
a large 'select' sql query by mistake and cancel it with control-C, let
it finish!), this resulted in having to restore the entire database.  I
spoke to TSM folks and they said in some future version we will be able
to start TSM in a mode to not need the roll forward log nice to know,
but not helpful right now.

The full database restore only took 3 hours. around 4,000,000 pages,
about 16 GB.
equipment: DLT 7000 tape drive, Sun Ultra 450 with 250 Mhz cpus.  I
didn't think that was that bad.
(the database is large because of a few large Notes servers using the
'Connect Agent' backup)
It restored from 1 full (on tape) and 4 incrementals (located on another
TSM server).

I agree with you, they need to do much better testing before releasing
all these fancy new features.
The TSM 3.7.2 for Solaris 2.6 wouldn't even *install* because of a bug
(now fixed with 3.7.2.2).
--
matthew.glanville AT kodak DOT com
matthew.glanville AT kodak DOT com
(716) 477-9371 phone
(716) 477-5241 fax