Hello Bryan, This is an interesting topic. Here are several thoughts and questions.
Licensing for NetBackup is also based on the class of the server and the class of the clients. The pricing keeps changing as some things that used to have a separate optional cost are merged into the base cost. As Both IBM and Symantec like to use 3rd party sellers it might also be interesting to find the best price. EMC's Avamar and Symantec's Pure disk are a little bit more like TSM in that they only do incremental backups. They take this a bit further alone then TSM in that they do block or segment incremental backups. They are a little different in that the block/segment is single instance across all backup clients covered by a backup server. I wonder if IBM is going to add this feature. Note this is not media or storage pool dedupe which Avamar, Pure disk and TSM support. They are also like TSM in that they require a data base to hold the meta-data. But different in that they hold the data blocks/segments also. This makes things interesting in that as far as I can tell a full backup of the backup server is not possible other than by replication. This make things interesting if one worries about backup server database corruption due to a software bug. I believe that comm vault also supports this backup model. But they are a little bit different in that they will move the data from the backup server to tape in the dedupe format, where the others reconstitute the deduped data before writing the data to tape. I am not sure if Syncsort and FDR also play in this game. In the Microsoft only world, Microsoft now sells a vss based product that works on windows and windows data base products including Exchange and Sharepoint. The last I heard they do not support other products such as Oracle DB and IBM DB/2. One could also look at hardware solutions from vendors such as data domain and netapp for many of one's backup needs. Not as full featured as the above products, has anyone been looking at the open sourced products? len -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of woodbm Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 2:11 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs 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. Thanks much, Bryan +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by woo...@nu.com via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to ab...@backupcentral.com. +----------------------------------------------------------------------