Preparing a presentation on TSM

[kfiresmith]

Hi All!

I'm thinking about jumping on an open position at my current work's D.C. office, and part of the interview process is to prepare a presentation on the topic of our choosing. For me I'm thinking about doing one on TSM. I've been a junior linux/tsm admin here for about a year and have a decent familiarity with TSM, but I'd like to keep my audience captivated with cool and interesting tidbits, trivia, and factoids about TSM and backups in general. Does anyone have any cool trivia or knowledge about TSM that I can use? I know that TSM was used by like 70% of Fortune 500s in 2007, is that still the case? Does anyone know where I can find a source on that?
Anything else?

THANKS!

 

[chad_small]

There is tons of material from the Oxford Symposium. Use one or many of these to put something together:

http://tsm-symposium.oucs.ox.ac.uk/2007contributions.html

 

[kfiresmith]

Thanks Chad!

While the symposium is a great resource for those who actively use TSM, I'm more looking for little factoids that can keep mgmt and non-techies entertained.

 

[ypcat]

Yeah, thanks Chad. I added a bookmark to that one.

Ok here's an idea...

You might want to talk to them about money and Data Management/DRM - managers and executives like talking about money, and you can relate disaster recovery to cost for them. Who knows you might even get a raise...

Start by discussing the information age and the lowest common denominator of that age; data. Go on to explain the defining characteristic of data is it's incredible rate of growth. You can talk about the 40 Mb drives from a few years ago to the current 1 TB drives which are now available to illustrate your point.

Then try chapter 2 in this Redbook:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246844.html?Open

Chapter 2 outlines the seven different methods of achieving real disaster recovery from level 0 which is none, through PTAM (pickup truck access method) all the way to site to site real time replication. It has a nice graphic if you're doing power point...

There have been many studies and documented cases and you can find much documentation via Google on how any company which experiences a major disaster (data loss) never recovers and how this is now the most important sector in business as every business has data, and every business is therefore vulnerable, etc. You can explain that real men don't backup data, real men just cry...

After you scare the hell out of them with that story; Cover the 7 layers of Disaster Recovery. For each layer discuss the costs and how TSM achieves the various layers, scales across the enterprise, serves as a single application to backup all platforms, how using IBM provides a single point of support (1-800-IBM-SERV) for all issues, which lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on the backend, and how most companies fail to achieve the simplest of the layers without a serious commitment to proper data management and stuff like that.

I also believe that over 90% of the fortune 1000 currently use TSM but I would check that and add it in there somewhere.

I would finish up by telling them how you enjoy working as part of the team which is responsible for such a critical aspect of thier IT; a guardian of the very life blood of the company...the data.