Jim,

First of all welcome to the list.  Next this is the right place for
questions like you have.

My first thought is why are you using so many tapes.  I would want to
first make sure that your TSM environment is running properly.  Where
are all the tapes?  Are they going off site and never coming back?  Are
you using DRM correctly?  Are my policies correct, i.e. am I keeping to
many versions for to long.  Maybe you are not recovering tapes because
you are not running the expiration process on a regular basis or are not
getting it to complete.  In general, TSM compared to other products uses
far fewer tapes.  I always getting concerned when I have customers who
have large numbers of tapes being consumed and almost always it is
related to something in the the way TSM is being run/managed.

In regards to 3rd party products, there are several products out there
that may help with predicting what your resource utilization will be.
However, the one I think  you should look at first is Servergraph.  It
sounds like you have a very large TSM environment and Servergraph works
very well in large multi-server environments.  It has some very good
trend analysis features as well.  In particular, it has a feature where
it predicts when a storage pool is going to run out of resources.  I
think this could be used to assist you in forecasting when tape
purchases would be needed.

I want to reiterate, unless you have a constantly growing amount of data
your tape utilization should not continue to grow.  I highly recommend
that you review your entire TSM environment to see if there is a fixable
reason for your tape consumption.

If you would like to discuss this in detail off line please feel free to
send me an email directly and we can arrange for a conversation.

--
Regards,
Mark D. Rodriguez
President MDR Consulting, Inc.

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Etchison, Jim (SBS US) wrote:

Greetings,

This is my first posting to this list, so please forgive me if this is
not the right type of question or the right group to ask.

I am currently a Client Manager for a large corporation that uses TSM as
its backup solution. TSM seems to be working very well for my client,
with one glaring exception: tape usage forecasting.

On a number of occasions I have had to "surprise" my client by telling
them they needed to buy thousands of more tapes. The first few times
this has been forgiven, but with each successive request, they have
gotten more and more irritated. From what I have been told by my Storage
Manager, TSM does not have any Tape Forecasting capabilities. But from a
business standpoint, this is a very real need because it is a
substantial cost.

At this point I am left with no option but to continue suprising my
customer, which is not a career-enhancing choice. :)

My question is this: how have others resolved this dilemma? Is there an
add-on product that can be purchased that might solve this?

Any help would be welcome. Thanks!