Commvault vs. TSM

[moon-buddy]

If you want to do simple backups and pretty pictures, go for CommVault.

If you want to have a data management system, none meets TSM in the eye.

PERIOD.

 

[Andrew Bienhaus]

And if you want the enterprise management, reporting, and prettiness on top of TSM, add something like Servergraph to the order.

(if that's ok to say here)

 

[ALT-G]

When someone trys to discredit the "incremental forever" approach I always beg to ask the question "why would I ever want to backup a file again that hasn't changed?" Seeing as TSM management class based retention only applies to "inactive" versions of files, or data, there is no risk to not having the data available for restore regardless of how old the file is....and if the file has been removed from the file system the deleted version retention policies will purge it accordingly.
Also, I have yet to find any report that I cannot produce using TSM Operational Reporting since taking the time to fully understand the use of select statements. Adding pretty pictures and colors a breeze (but frankly I find them a distraction).

....hmmm, wonder what happened to our CommVault reps????

 

[Andrew Bienhaus]

As long as the delete retention is set correctly, yes.

And incremental forever is great, as long as it's only making one backup, of that file... I've seen so many now, where TSM (obviously through day-t-day hussle and bustle management) has stored many many more copies of that one file.

The select statements are great, as long as you're not trusting that TSM got all your data, when it declares a backup as "successful".

 

[icewalker]

I've used a lot of different backup technologies in my years. I only recently took over a TSM Environment (recently being about 2 years ago). While there was indeed a learning curve I had to overcome (as well as a corrupted database), I eventually found TSM to be the best backup solution I've ever used.

There is no doubt that it can meet just about any situation head on. The important thing to remember is that TSM is more than a backup solution. It is a DR solution. It is a data life cycle management solution. All built into one application.

But I must also admit, I'm biased. I'm one of those AIX Admins that refuses to use smit (much less the websm). I'm command line 100%. So TSM fits with me very nicely.