At least let IBM know you are thinking about jumping ship and that they need to 
help with the pricing on the new licenses or you are gone!  You have the 
leverage at this point so you might as well use it to your advantage.

Based on our many competitive situations along the way with our appliance we do 
this all the time. For the low end, TSM is not a good fit generally.  However, 
if you have more than 50 clients then TSM is a good fit for the reasons Remco 
states.

Taking a giant step back to the 20th century with your backups (which is what 
you'll be doing with any other product) is generally a bad idea.

Oh, IBM!  Are you listening?  The current licensing scheme is just killing us!  
Stop the madness before we lose more of our installed base. Stop the madness 
before I lose another Appliance deal!

Kelly Lipp
Chief Technology Officer
www.storserver.com
719-266-8777 x7105
STORServer solves your data backup challenges.
Once and for all.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Remco Post
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 3:15 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs

On 30 dec 2009, at 20:11, woodbm wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I have been tasked with looking at alternatives to TSM due to recent Audit 
> from IBM and the amount of money we just shelled out for the TSM License.  I 
> am sure most of you have pertaken to this wonderful experience.  I don't 
> really want to move away from TSM, but have to provide alternatives to 
> management.  Could anyone direct me to where I can begin my search.  I have 
> only used TSM my entire time here.  What is the industry leader?  Any info or 
> documents or links doing a comparison would be helpful.  Also, is the license 
> structure the same for other environments as well or is IBM way out of line?  
> I am going to start with EMC's Avamar/Networker.
>

there are a few products that people try to compare TSM to; Networker, 
Netbackup and CommVault come to mind.

Keep in mind that all of these require full backups at some interval, occupying 
much more tape that TSM does. So when presenting alternatives, do not only 
consider licensing cost but also the cost of media, servers, network etc. Also 
keep in mind that some products are disk to tape only, requiring you to have at 
least one tape drive for each concurrent backup/restore session, or implement 
expensive VTL solutions while TSM doesn't need one. (The IBM VTS for the 
mainframe was running ADSM for a reason!).

Licensing schemes for these products are completely different. While IBM 
charges for cpu's, competitors also charge for functionality, such as 
archiving? drm? The number of volumes you can manage in a library? The number 
of drives? etc. Look into what you need and make sure you have the total 
picture.

As a word of advise, make sure that the audit is correct. I've seen IBM try to 
charge customers for TDP for databases for DB2, while everybody knows that 
there is no such product! If in doubt, challenge the audit results, this might 
be worth the effort.

> Thanks much,
> Bryan
>
> +----------------------------------------------------------------------
> |This was sent by woodbm AT nu DOT com via Backup Central.
> |Forward SPAM to abuse AT backupcentral DOT com.
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--
Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622