First, my response is aimed at giving you some ammo to use in meetings,
not aimed at shooting the messenger.

Since the licensing is such a small part of what you pay to maintain a
backup environment, moving to another backup product purely on that is
absolutely a wrong decision.   The cost of a backup environment comes
from a number of things, not the least of which is cost of operation.

If your backup environment is stable and you're meeting your RTO/RPO
objectives, then switching to another product just because its licensing
is cheaper is a sure-fire way to create instabilities and recovery
failures.  I'm not saying that this would be EMC/NetWorker's fault, I'm
saying that switching backup products is a HUGE undertaking with a very
steep learning curve and will undoubtedly result in instability for an
indeterminate amount of time.  (It will also cost quite a bit,
completely negating the original reason for switching.) This is
especially true when switching to/from TSM.  It's very hard to mentally
switch from the versions method that TSM uses to the
grandfather/father/son methods of other products and vice versa.

If you said "we have this requirement and we've consulted both IBM and
independent TSM experts and they all tell us TSM can't do it," then I'd
say see if another product can do it.  But that's, of course, not what
you're saying.

I agree with another respondent that said use this position to
renegotiate pricing with IBM.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies 

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Schneider, John
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 9:55 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM vs. Legato Networker Comparison

Greetings,
        We have been a TSM shop for many years, but EMC came to our
management with a proposal to replace our TSM licenses with Legato
Networker, at a better price than what we are paying for TSM today.
This came right on the heels of paying our large TSM license bill, and
so it got management's attention.
        We have an infrastructure of 15 TSM servers and about 1000
clients, so this would be a large and painful migration.  It would also
require a great deal of new hardware and consultant costs during the
migration, which would detract from the cost savings.
        So instead of jumping from one backup product to another based
on price alone, we have been asked to do an evaluation between the two
products.  Do any of you have any feature comparisons between the two
products that would give me a head start?  


Best Regards,

John D. Schneider
Email:  schnjd AT stlo.mercy DOT net