Banana Software
mature at the customers side :-)
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]Im Auftrag von
Mark D. Rodriguez
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 10. März 2005 19:19
An: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Betreff: Re: If we all complain, do you think they will add the WEB gui
back?
Hi Everyone,
I am an IBM Business Partner. I have been listening to what everyone
has been saying about the ISC/AC. I, also, have some concerns about
this since I not only have to use it I have to be able to sell it to
others to use. I have been talking with several IBM'ers in this
regard. The people I have been talking to are on both the TSM
development side and on the channel (sales and marketing) side of the
house. Obviously the channel people are very concerned when anything
might possibly effect the ability of IBM BP's to sell their products.
As such, I have been seeking to get them to put pressure on the
development side to get some sort of improvements made. I have talked
with the developers to help them see the issues that I see with my
customers as well as what I have learned from all of you on this list.
Also, you should know that IBM is listening and they are willing to make
the necessary changes to resolve these issues. They are monitoring this
list all the time so the only real survey you need to do is keep posting
to the list!
Now before I go to much further, I must make this statement (i.e. here
comes the legal disclaimer), anything that I am about to disclose here
is simply the results and/or contexts of conversation that I had with
various IBM'ers and in no way implies any commitment on their or my part
to provide any of the things we discussed. In other words we were just
talking, but they were not promising anything. The biggest problem I
see with the ISC/AC is not the application itself, change is inevitable
and in fact in this case somewhat overdue. The problem with the ISC/AC
is that there is not any reasonable migration path from the Web Admin
GUI to the ISC/AC. They just flipped a switch and now you used ISC/AC
and oh by the way it doesn't support any of your older TSM servers. Not
a good plan and I think they recognize it as well. However, I will
defend the developers to the point that there were very good reasons for
the decisions that they made and how we wound up where we are today.
Given similar situation I would have made similar choices with the
exception I would have spent the time and resources to have a better
migration path. As you all have probably guessed by now the ISC/AC
isn't going away any time soon, nor should it. We have been long
overdue for a improved GUI admin interface. The ISC/AC isn't perfect by
any stretch of the imagination, but I have every confidence that IBM
will develop it into a very mature tool as quickly as possible. I will
mention some of the "POSSIBLE" enhancements that are upcoming later in
this note.
The focus of my discussion with the IBM powers that be was around how do
we give the TSM community a better migration path to the ISC/AC
environment. The key issue we focused on for creating a better
migration path was the re-release of the Web Admin GUI. Obviously the
the best thing would be to re-release it and have it support all of the
5.3 enhancements, but that comes at a cost. The trade off would be to
take resources away from the ISC/AC development in order to uplift the
Web Admin GUI. I don't think that is in the best interests of the TSM
community as a whole. I suspect that what will happen is the Web Admin
GUI will be re-released but frozen at the 5.2 level with no further
development being done to it. My guess is it will be around through the
5.3 release and maybe little longer, like until all supported version of
the TSM server are supported on the ISC/AC. I understand there was some
talk of making the ISC/AC backwards compatible with version 5.2 but that
did not go anywhere. Re-releasing the Web Admin GUI under this limited
arrangement offers the compromise of best possible use of resources and
a good migration path for the end users. This proposal would allow
users to have time to migrate to the new ISC/AC and gain some competence
and confidence in the ISC/AC while still having a tried and true
interface available to them. Also, this gives IBM the time to make the
ISC/AC a much more mature product before having it be the only choice
for GUI admin support.
The ISC/AC is going to become a much better product over time. Although
it will certainly have a much greater value to those of you who have
multiple TSM servers or who have several different IBM products that
will be managed by the ISC, it will also be very good tool for those of
you with just one server and no other products managed by the ISC.
There are 2 big TSM updates scheduled for this year one in April and
another in the September/October time frame. I would "GUESS" (i.e. I
can't promise anything) that you will see several improvements to the
ISC/AC environment. Like most of you I thought the command line
interface available through the ISC/AC was useless at best, well I
predict that will be greatly improved. It will have much more space,
better fonts, just hit enter to get the command to run (I really hated
clicking the submit button!), and command recall. Speaking of the
submit button, how about the "GO" button that has got to go! And I
think it will. And of course one of the biggest complaints is all the
resources that it needs both during install and when it is running
normally. I think the install process will be cleaned so that you can
install it with under 100M of temp space and you will have an
environment variable to tell it where to find that temp space. They are
aware and are actively reducing the amount of system resources, i.e.
memory and CPU cycles, that the ISC/AC will use when running. This will
really help those of you running a single TSM server and wanting to run
the ISC/AC on the same box as your TSM server. Overall the ISC/AC is
maturing and will continue to do so at a very accelerated pace for the
foreseeable future. Your comments and concerns about it are being heard
and appropriate action are being taken. I would encourage all of you to
continue to give your feedback on the ISC/AC on this list and through
your BP's as well.
Again, I want to make it clear that I do not have the authority to make
any promises as to what will be done in the future with these products.
At no time did IBM make any commitments to me (or anyone else to my
knowledge) to implement any of the changes discussed above.
If anyone of you would like to discuss thus further please email me
directly and we can setup a phone call. If there is enough interest I
might be able to set up a conference call where we could discuss this as
a group.
Sorry for the long post but I though this was important information to
get out to all of you.
--
Regards,
Mark D. Rodriguez
President MDR Consulting, Inc.
===============================================================================
MDR Consulting
The very best in Technical Training and Consulting.
IBM Advanced Business Partner
SAIR Linux and GNU Authorized Center for Education
IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert, CATE
AIX Support and Performance Tuning, RS6000 SP, TSM/ADSM and Linux
Red Hat Certified Engineer, RHCE
===============================================================================
John C Dury wrote:
> I realise there are other threads about this issue but for those of
>you who don't know yet, the WEB GUI interface into the TSM server is
>officially gone as of version 5.3. It's been replaced by something called
>the Integrated Solutions Console (ISC) which, in my opinion (and many
>others) is almost useless.
> Do you think if we all contact our IBM reps, they could possibly add
>the WEB GUI back into the product? I know it's a long shot but I imagine if
>enough of us say something, they might actually listen. Personally I am
>more of a command line person anyways but for our Help Desk people and
>other casual users, it's a whole new learning curve.
>Thoughts?
>John
>
>
>
|
