I have been reviewing many VTL solutions for use in our TSM
environment.  I am curious to know what other vendors you considered
and eliminated.  There are many out there.  I am also wondering if
you considered the data-reduction or de-duplication capabilities of
the various products.  This is a relatively new technology that is
being added to many VTL products.  Sepaton has announced theirs, and
I believe that FalconStor will have this at some point too.

Some advantages that I see with Septaton's product are that they are
TSM-aware, particularly in their de-duplication technology, and also
they have scalable performance.

If you went with FalconStor, would you buy your own disk storage and
use their software?  Or would you buy one of the products that is
based on FalconStor (there are many)?

I'm also intrigued by Diligent's product and wondered if you had
considered them or not.  And if you eliminated them, what your
reasons were (if you care to share).

Sepaton seems to have gotten some traction, particularly in the TSM
space.  I'm not so sure about Diligent.

Sepaton's deduplication engine is out-of-band.  That is to say that
the deduplication is done after the fact.  Diligent's is
in-band.  There are pros and cons for doing it each way, I guess.

..Paul

At 04:02 PM 8/11/2006, you wrote:

We've narrowed down our search for a VTL appliance to use with TSM to the
2 subject vendors.  I'd like to hear the pros/ cons from the TSM users
community on their experiences with these devices:   Reliability, vendor
service, performance etc.   All comments welcomed.

Larry Peifer
TSM / AIX Administrator

--
Paul Zarnowski                            Ph: 607-255-4757
Manager, Storage Services                 Fx: 607-255-8521
719 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3801    Em: psz1 AT cornell DOT edu