Hi,

It's clear that I'm not alone with my issues.

I wonder how TSM will be able to survive in a backup world where other vendors
are delivering high-end technology that works.
Yes, TSM can do VMware backup, dedup, data synchronisation, monitoring,
scalability, ...
Looking at the feature list and what they support, TSM can do more than most
other vendors.

But everyone recommends to disable dedup, otherwise you will get stability
problems and you will blowup your database.  So dedup is a useless feature.

TSM can do data synchronisatie between 2 TSM servers.  I know it's changed,
but in the first version you had the same settings for version and so on.  Not
really flexible.  But for data synchronisation it's best to enable dedup.  See
my first point regarding dedup....  So data synchronisation is also a useless
feature.

Web based management: give me back the old web GUI running on port 1580!!!
That was the ONLY web based GUI that could do everything.  All other web based
stuff IBM tried to reinvent was able to do some management and some reporting
but not everything.  You still need the command line.

And don't ever install the latest version like 7.1.1.100 or you will get some
nasty bugs.  Wait at least 3 months in the hope that someone else found the
bug.

The latest version of TSM for VE is finally usable.   It took only 3 years to
get the product in a state that you can install and trust.

If you look at the server farm, there is a clear shift from dedicated hardware
(Intel, Power, ...) to VMware.  There is some mainframe left, but all other
vendors (HP, SUN, ...) are a minority.
So VMware backup is the future: yes, TSM can do that.  But Veeam also for
1/100 of the price.  And with dedup that works and all other nice goodies!
Veeam lacks tape support that works but they are very hard working on it.  And
if you need something more powerfull, then use CommVault: they support
everything that TSM does!


For me, the future of TSM is very uncertain....


Stef