+1 on the challenge!!  We were audited, and what a nightmare at first.
They tried to charge us for boxes that had been retired, but were
unlocked for legal restore reasons, they also tried to inflate the cost
of clustered boxes and TDP setups.  You only have to pay for cores on
the ACTIVE nodes of a cluster.  Now if both are active then you pay for
both, but if you run, as we do, active/passive clusters you only pay for
the node with the higher number of cpu/cores.  At times our passive node
will not have the resources assigned to it the primary node has.

I kept challenging and pushing back on them, and they finally sent me to
another crew that had more sense.  Once we agreed that IBM's licensing
statements were valid because that's what we used to purchase, things
were good.  We even had a few extra.  Not only that, but despite their
assertions you DO NOT have to buy your licenses from them, you can get a
quote and buy from your normal reseller so your normal discounts apply.


See Ya'
Howard Coles Jr.
John 3:16!

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Remco Post
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 4:15 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs

On 30 dec 2009, at 20:11, woodbm wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I have been tasked with looking at alternatives to TSM due to recent
Audit from IBM and the amount of money we just shelled out for the TSM
License.  I am sure most of you have pertaken to this wonderful
experience.  I don't really want to move away from TSM, but have to
provide alternatives to management.  Could anyone direct me to where I
can begin my search.  I have only used TSM my entire time here.  What is
the industry leader?  Any info or documents or links doing a comparison
would be helpful.  Also, is the license structure the same for other
environments as well or is IBM way out of line?  I am going to start
with EMC's Avamar/Networker.
> 

there are a few products that people try to compare TSM to; Networker,
Netbackup and CommVault come to mind.

Keep in mind that all of these require full backups at some interval,
occupying much more tape that TSM does. So when presenting alternatives,
do not only consider licensing cost but also the cost of media, servers,
network etc. Also keep in mind that some products are disk to tape only,
requiring you to have at least one tape drive for each concurrent
backup/restore session, or implement expensive VTL solutions while TSM
doesn't need one. (The IBM VTS for the mainframe was running ADSM for a
reason!).

Licensing schemes for these products are completely different. While IBM
charges for cpu's, competitors also charge for functionality, such as
archiving? drm? The number of volumes you can manage in a library? The
number of drives? etc. Look into what you need and make sure you have
the total picture.

As a word of advise, make sure that the audit is correct. I've seen IBM
try to charge customers for TDP for databases for DB2, while everybody
knows that there is no such product! If in doubt, challenge the audit
results, this might be worth the effort.

> Thanks much,
> Bryan
> 
>
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-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622