Input from the TSM Gurus?

[GregE]

A small, recently acquired division of my company is looking for a data backup solution. Currently they are looking to external sources (costing much $$$$), but it was brought to their attention that we may be able to provide this for them here, over the network to our TSM environment.

I know some basic things I'll need to know - network capabilities, amount of data and types, restore expectations, retention expectations, etc etc, but I'd be interested in some good items to ask of them when I talk to them briefly this afternoon as a first contact conference call. Many of you here are much more experienced than I am, and have interacted with many many companies on the subject.

I welcome all thoughts here. Thank you.

 

[n9hmg]

You need to know how much data to get up front, how much of it changes, how fast the pipe is, how reliable the pipe is (I was cursed with a full 2% error rate, and the network team had that as acceptable in their SLA), compressibility of the data, ability of the clients to compress. Then match up the numbers. Do you have or can you get enough storage to accomodate the data. Can you accept the additional throughput. Can the pipe do the job? Can it do the job in the window they demand?
If they're sending you 1TB of oracle RMAN every night and you've got to suck it across an OC3, and you get the whole line, and you get 100% utilization, in a fantasy world you can be done in 16 hours. In the real world, you might get it in a day. Regardless, that's a long time for a db to be in backup mode, and would be considered a failure.
If you're backing up their windows file servers, 10 TB in 100,000,000 text-equavalent files, with 1 million changing daily, you could easily be done in a under an hour every night.

If taking their backups is going to overwhelm your incoming storage and have everything fighting for tape mountpoints, it's going to fail. If holding all their data leaves no scratch in the library, it's a fail.

It's just going to be a matter of information and math.

 

[GregE]

Thank you. I've gathered some info from them. Their data structure isn't very complicated. No Oracle, just 16 Windows servers (14 filesystem only, one Exchange, one MS SQL), and two UNIX servers to be backed up as filesystems, no database on them.

That said, they backup all of their data to a Windows2003 server, then ArcServe migrates that to an 8-slot LTO tape device. I'm not sure at this point how it's setup but likely that isn't going to be able to remain that way if TSM is to backup things properly. Originally we thought this was a NAS device, but now have more info. It's not NAS at all, just Windows 2003 Standard backing up everything to it.