I teach our Level 1 students that having fewer domains rather than more makes more sense. Further, I suggest a separate domain for systems that have vastly different retention policies for most if not all of their data. If you find, though, that you have a number of clients that have lots of different sorts of data, each requiring a different retention, then you are left with having fewer domains and more management classes. I believe, in general, this is the way to go. That said, it's a bit more difficult to define the various includes to get data going to the right place.
Most importantly I've learned the notion of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. The more of anything you have, the more complicated it is. Well run TSM shops typically have several (less than 10) domains and probably on the order of 30 management classes (and most of these are repeats across the domains). As you noted: most organizations don't have the time or inclination to actually do the work do define retention policies in the first place! Once done, however, you have a much easier and predictable system to manage. And probably will spend less time in a court of law somewhere down the line. Kelly Lipp CTO STORServer, Inc. 485-B Elkton Drive Colorado Springs, CO 80907 719-266-8777 www.storserver.com -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Norman Bloch Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:48 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Best practice for Policy Domains I remember I read many years ago in the manual : a Policy Domain is a logical grouping of nodes. Rather than splitting between OS, I would make Policy Domains for File servers, Application servers, Mail Servers, whatever if it's unix or windows or ... Norman Shannon Bach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> 05/06/2008 21:22 Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> To ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU cc Subject [ADSM-L] Best practice for Policy Domains I have always been told that it is easiest to maintain as few Policy Domains as you can get away with. Currently I have a standard Policy Domain which is the Default for all Windows boxes, a Policy Domain for our Domino TDP servers, an UNIX Policy Domain for all UNIX flavors. Recently I was talked into creating a separate Policy Domain for 2 UNIX clients that backup directly to tape and need special retentions. Now it has been suggested that I do the same to use as special retention buckets...even though not all the different departments have retentions standards as yet...although hopefully this will be clearer to them in the next year or so. My question is this..if we start creating different Policy Domains to use as Retention buckets could that not turn out to be potentially 10-20 domains until the data owners actually define a retention policy for all their data? What would be the pros and cons of doing this vs keeping what I have and just using different management classes? Is there something I'm not seeing in the big picture if we do decide to use the Policy Domains as Retention buckets? We have an average of 150 clients with a mixture of Windows, Unix and Domino TDPs. Thanks as always for any suggestions or ideas anyone may have on this subject. Shannon