Sorry to be so late in responding to this from an ADSM point of view, but
we are putting the final touches on our ADSM/2 and ADSM/6000 product that
will be generally available March 25 (more on that later).

ADSM, though it does not specifically support point-in-time restores today,
is architecturally able to do so, and is working on putting that function
into a future release of ADSM.  Everyone's points are valid, but remember
we are at release 1 of a new product family with many important and
interesting enhancements to come throughout 1994 and 1995.

ADSM is working towards supporting all of the various failure states that
system's can find themselves in.  These include but are not limited to:

1. Single/multiple file corruption (handled pretty good today)
2. File system failure (handled fairly good today)
3. Hard file (disk) failure (done fairly good for non-Unix system today since
     there is an easy mapping between drives of c:, d:, etc., to hard disks,
     this is no so for Unix (need to know where the filesystems are
     physically, where are the LVMs, etc... this is being looked at)
4. Application or partial system failure where the system is in an
   inconsistent state.  This is where point in time restore is really
   needed to regress the system to a consistent state.  Not handled well by
   ADSM today, but you can create snapshots of critical subsystems by
   automating archive functions via ADSM's archive subsystem.  You can do this
   via central scheduled operations or cron jobs, etc..
5. Total system disaster.  ADSM has the ability to store all of the data
    needed to restore a system today.  What is not currently provided is
    bootstrap images and base system reconfiguration assistance.  A site
    can create these procedures today with available tools, but it is not
    all centrally located or coordinated yet.

ADSM is working to solve all of these situations.  You can help us by
indicating what priority you would like to see functions delivered in.

Advertisement:  ADSM/2 and ADSM/6000 are scheduled to be shipped on 3/25/94.
This includes new servers on AIX and OS/2, with new clients of SCO, DEC
Ultrix, Novell 4.01 & 3.11 (3.12 not quite ready yet, but real soon!).
Support is provided for 8mm tape drives and libraries, optical drives and
libraries, plus the world class IBM 3490 drives and libraries on the
6000 server.  This is the first of many ADSM enhancements due out this year.

Paul Bradshaw, ADSM Asst. Sol'n Mgr.