What are folks using to do TSM trending?  I need to answer questions like
these:

- How long will our current supply of scratch tapes last, assuming
constant usage?
- If I add <insert a number> TSM clients similar to an existing client,
how will it affect my tape usage?
- What's our peak drive usage (smoothed over some reasonable interval)?
- If we move certain TSM clients to an offsite TSM server and library, how
many drives will I need offsite?
- Why did my tape usage go up on <insert a date>?

I've played with TSMManager some.  It seems to answer some of those
questions (like the drive usage) easily, and I'm guessing that it could
answer the other questions with a bit more effort.  Is that right?

I've found that TSM's own tools (the TSM web GUI and that ghastly thing
that's replaced it in TSM 5.3) give a better view of the trees than the
forest.  They're OK for day-to-day tasks, but not for trending.

I would just as soon write Perl scripts to distill the logs, but my
management would rather have me do other things, particularly if there's a
canned answer out there.

We're willing to spend money to get reliable answers to these questions.

Thanks,
anker