My $0.02.

I guess if you are doing a whole bunch of LAN Free stuff or NDMP backups
it can be nice since you can just define the drives as you need them and
not worry too much about drive contention (the throughput requirements for
such a large LAN Free environment would make me skeptical about using a
VTL though). Other than that I can't think of any really compelling reason
to do it. Put it this way, we were offered a VTL with about 35TB of disk
from one of the big storage vendors "free", and  turned it down. After
doing some research, it just didn't seem to fit in our environment. There
wasn't a lot it did, I couldn't do with TSM and a bunch of disk.

Oh, not sure how much of a benefit this is, but they do claim 3:1
compression, something a TSM disk or file device won't do itself. If
client side compression isn't an option for you that may be one upside of
these systems.

Curtis



David E Ehresman <deehre01 AT LOUISVILLE DOT EDU>
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11/29/2004 02:42 PM
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Subject
Re: size of active vs. inactive?






>>It has also been discussed several times that TSM doesn't appear to be
a
good fit for a VTL. May want to search the archives to find out more on
the
subject.<<

Has anyone heard of good experiences with TSM on a virtual tape
library?  Can this ever be a good thing?