Steve,

There are several approaches to accomplish differing retention requirements
as your customer desires.  The first, maybe most obvious is the one you
proposed... multiple TSM clients for each retention req., for example,
NODE, NODE-WEEKLY, NODE-MONTHLY.  This of course gobbles up client licenses
if you do it on several clients.  But the main drawback we found doing it
that way was remembering which node to restore from... we had a few panic
attacks when trying to restore a file from the "NODE", when it just
happened that the day we needed was on the NODE-MONTHLY set...

So, we have gradually retired all of our "-MONTHLY" nodes, and instead use
a domain list to limit TSM's daily backups to not backup database table
spaces.

Your situation is a little different, though.  We do something similar for
our Domino servers (we are not using TDP for Domino yet).  We do
incrementals on them daily, which get retained for 30 days.  Then we do a
monthly archive which gets retained for 1 year.  This won't work for you,
though because you need three levels of retention.

You may want to try GENERATE BACKUPSET.  This accomplished totally on the
TSM server, and each backupset can have different retention criteria.  But,
there is a bug in the  expiration of backupsets at the 3.7 level... they
don't expire at all.  I'm not sure at what level the fix is available...
but if I was in your shoes, I'd look at backupsets first.

Hope this helps!
Robin Sharpe
Berlex Laboratories