Hi all!

I need some help!

We are presently looking for a 'NAS' type solution for email delivery.  At
this time, we use a large number of UNIX boxen to relay, route, deliver, and
store *vast* amounts of email for 48,000 students/staff on our campus.  We have
been approached by several different companies that provide 'dedicated
appliances', that do everything from scoop to nuts when it comes to email.

When I sit in the meetings with these folks, I ask the hard question... How
do we do backups?  There answer is 'duh.. don't you use Legato or Veritas?  We
support those natively'  'Grrr', I say.  'No, we use TSM.' 'oh', they say.

Then, we start getting technical, and they tell me that they do 'expose NDMP'
and TSM can do that.  Well, not exactly true.  Tivoli has not GA'd an NDMP
client yet, and NDMP is not exactly a pretty protocol for backup/restore.

What I am looking for are others, especially Universities, that are using
ADSM/TSM to back up email, that may be interested in looking into integrated
email solutions.  If I can actually tell these vendors that TSM is widely used
by universities (and of course, others) for this type of application, they
might actually think about supporting it.  I am sorry, but Veritas is *not*
the only enterprise backup software solution.  NAS vendors should start
looking for better ways to do backup/restore in large environments.

I would also be interested in hearing what others are doing in large capacity
email shops.  Are people using appliances?  Do they support TSM?  Anyone doing
NDMP?

Feel free to reply to me directly. I will not give out names or email
addresses to sales people either!

Thanks in advance!

Bob Booth
University of Illinois - Urbana