Hm.
If YOU know they need to buy "thousands" of more tapes, how did you come
up with that number?!?
TSM can't "forecast" anything - a human has to do that.
TSM can't know, for example, that your customer is planning to add daily
backups for a 100GB Exchange data base.
Or that the TSM administrator has changed retention time from 30 days to
365.
But if you want to track growth in tape usage, for example, that is
easily obtained from TSM.
For example:
dsmadmc -id=tsmadminid -password=adminpwd -commadelimited "select
CURRENT_DATE as DATE,'$TSMSRV','TSMTAPE','STGVOL',count(volume_name),
stgpool_name as stgpool from volumes where devclass_name <> 'DISK'
group by stgpool_name"
This will give you a comma-delimited list with a count of the number of
tapes in each storage pool.
Do it once a week, and you can pop it right into Excel and draw some
graphs showing how fast each pool is growing.
I find this even more useful:
dsmadmc -id=tsmadminid -password=adminpwd -commadelimited "select
CURRENT_DATE as DATE,'$TSMSRV','SPACEAUDIT',n.domain_name, n.node_name
as node, a.backup_mb, a.backup_copy_mb,a.archive_mb, a.archive_copy_mb
from nodes n, auditocc a where a.node_name=n.node_name"`;
That gives you a comma-delimited list of the MB each client has stored
in TSM storage. Again, do it once a week, pop it into EXCEL, and you
can easily draw some graphs that show who the biggest clients are and
how fast they are growing over time, or how fast each domain group is
growing over time. THAT is the information you need to feed back to
your customer so this becomes a career-enhancing task!.
Now the numbers you get from TSM are not precise. TSM can only count
how many MB comes in from the clients and how much data it sends out to
the tape drives. Sometimes people have the clients compressing data
BEFORE it goes to TSM, and most people have tape drives that do
compression AFTER TSm sends the data to them. So there isn't a 1-to-1
correspondence between how much data TSM sends to the tape drives and
how many GB of tape you use. And you will use more-or-less tape
depnding on how aggressive the TSM administrator is with reclaim. But
the numbers ARE useful in a relative sense - you'll be able to show the
space-hogging clients, and how fast they are growing.
Wanda Prather
"I/O, I/O, It's all about I/O" -(me)
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Etchison, Jim (SBS US)
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 3:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Tape Usage Forecasting
Greetings,
This is my first posting to this list, so please forgive me if this is
not the right type of question or the right group to ask.
I am currently a Client Manager for a large corporation that uses TSM as
its backup solution. TSM seems to be working very well for my client,
with one glaring exception: tape usage forecasting.
On a number of occasions I have had to "surprise" my client by telling
them they needed to buy thousands of more tapes. The first few times
this has been forgiven, but with each successive request, they have
gotten more and more irritated. From what I have been told by my Storage
Manager, TSM does not have any Tape Forecasting capabilities. But from a
business standpoint, this is a very real need because it is a
substantial cost.
At this point I am left with no option but to continue suprising my
customer, which is not a career-enhancing choice. :)
My question is this: how have others resolved this dilemma? Is there an
add-on product that can be purchased that might solve this?
Any help would be welcome. Thanks!
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