Hey you kids, get off my yard! <Sorry Richard, couldn't resist.>

It seems that many of us have a parental relationship with the product.
In any other case, we would likely have severed the connection some time
ago. <Code quality wandering all over, price going up, audits? You think
you're a domestic US car maker?>

Clearly the product is facing a challenge with its peers and up and
comers, and needs to show ongoing improvement and increased value.
<chuckle> Or to put it another way "we choose to " ... rebuild TSM on
DB2 ... " in this decade and do the other things, not because they are
easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Short of unbundling an NSM, this is easily the biggest challenge I've
seen TSM admins (myself included)face. Sometimes I have hope that the
nascent third-party helper applications will offer some help, but some
of them aren't even ready for the transition to 6.x.

This list makes a positive impact, by surfacing obscure tecnical
knowledge, and disabusing people of their preconceived notions. It may
be time for Tivoli/IBM to put some liasons in place, and offer people a
hand as they make this difficult transition.

[RC]

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Richard Sims
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 5:18 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] TSM 6.1 Installation Problems

On Jun 4, 2009, at 7:21 AM, Hans Christian Riksheim wrote:

> ...
> Frankly, I am a bit worried. I look at the bloat at Passport 
> Advantage(4GB download for reporting? Seriuos?) and it seems that 
> every piece of s**t software that IBM has produced now is forced upon 
> us.
> Already TSM in itself has a steep learning curve with a lot of 
> different "strange" concepts, but IBM obviously doesn't seem to think 
> this is enough in their ongoing effort to scare off potential 
> customers. An installation of 6.1 with reporting and administration on

> a small site with for example a 2 drive, 40 slot library will require 
> how many servers? 3? One for TSM, one for admin and one for reporting?
> ...

Indeed.  I've been with the product since ADSM v.2, and have seen it
grow enormously.  Even having been part of that evolution, the growing
amount of complexity can be overwhelming.  We see customers writing in
having difficulty with even basic functionality in the product: Having
to additionally cope with LAN-Free, Library Manager/Client, encryption
key management, Fibre Channel fabric and other technologies to make
things work has to be daunting.  (And don't overlook inscrutable
licensing regimens.)  This certainly creates opportunities for
competitors offering streamlined, straightforward solutions to data
assurance needs.  Realization of this may be why IBM acquired the
targeted B/R product Fastback from FilesX last year.

The TSM product is obviously trying to accommodate all the latest
technologies out there so as to meet all needs.  The difficulty in
trying to do that is that the result can be a huge monolith of a product
with such intertwined development requirements that implementing
seemingly simple new features can entail an inordinate amount of time
and coordination.  The danger in that approach is in ending up with a
massive composite like Microsoft did with Windows, with its
Longhorn/Vista development debacle.  I'd instead go for a more modular
approach, where customers can acquire and plug in what they really need,
toward more efficient, focused solutions to their needs.  This would
make for more streamlined, timely development, and new releases that
customers eagerly embrace rather than recoil from in fear.

     Richard Sims


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