If you have a lot of Windows clients, look at TSM's FASTBACK.  It is also
disk only, but I believe is cheaper than straight TSM.  Does
incremental-only, block-level backups.  Might save you $$ and not be as
drastic a conversion.  You could keep your non-WIndows clients as they are.

ALso consider if you are planning to move to a Virtual environment sometime
soon, a lot of your TSM licenses will disappear.  You only pay for the TSM
licenses on your ESX server(s), not a license for each client image.

At least if there is the possibility of virtualization in your future, be
sure to compare what the costs will be AFTER virtualization, between TSM and
other products.

W

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Xav Paice <xpaice AT oss.co DOT nz> wrote:

> ----- "Len Boyle" <Len.Boyle AT SAS DOT COM> wrote:
>
>
> > Not as full featured as the above products, has anyone been looking at
> > the open sourced products?
> >
>
> We use Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/) for the smaller customers (and
> internally) since it does all we need it to do - but note there's some major
> limitations in capability.   It has proved to be reliable and simple to
> maintain, but for larger customers the volume of data transfer and storage
> makes it more cost effective to use TSM.
>
> So far we've not found any open product that does an incremental forever
> backup, but are continually looking.
>