For the last few years, I was the point-man in the UNIX department at my last job for Tivoli Storage Manager support. We had a separate department called Storage Management that contained the "Architects" of that environment. During my time there, I got very interested in TSM and have studied it a great deal.
Now I'm at a company who also uses TSM, but where there isn't an architecture type of group, and we're running into growth related issues. I believe the end-run of a detailed study of TSM results in: a) the ability to predict the impact of a specific client (or group of clients) growth on the overall needs for that environment, and b) the ability to predict the increased needs of storage pool disk and tape mount requirements based on changes like that in item a) above. Up to this point, I'm just not quite there. I've built some reports like daily host backup amounts, daily changes in host occupancy; studied the details of the policy domains, policy sets, management classes, and copy groups, obtained a general understanding of the retention policies, etc., but I still don't quite have my hands around the big picture. Right now, we're in a situation where our daily backups are going to disk just fine. The problem we're having with the enormous increase in Email backups (we don't currently delete anything due to a recent decree by management) is that our offsite copy pool backups are no longer completing within the 24 hour magic window. I suspect there is a set of procedures that is generally accepted that would help to define increasing needs for the TSM environment. I'm sure I need to begin capturing the daily amounts of data that gets backed up in the BACKUP STORAGE POOL processes, and perhaps even the MIGRATION processes. All that being said, is there a set of guidelines that can help me define exactly what increase in hardware we might need, or something that would help me to tell management that "to add another X amount of drives would get us back to completing the offsite copy pool process (and thus the entire day's processing) to within the 24 hour window? Details: TSM Server 5.2.2.0 on AIX 5.2 7026/6H1; 4Gb memory; 3584 Library; 18 LTO2 drives. Currently there are no drives to spare to add additional mounts for the Backup Storage Pool processes.
