Jim, First of all welcome to the list. Next this is the right place for questions like you have.
My first thought is why are you using so many tapes. I would want to first make sure that your TSM environment is running properly. Where are all the tapes? Are they going off site and never coming back? Are you using DRM correctly? Are my policies correct, i.e. am I keeping to many versions for to long. Maybe you are not recovering tapes because you are not running the expiration process on a regular basis or are not getting it to complete. In general, TSM compared to other products uses far fewer tapes. I always getting concerned when I have customers who have large numbers of tapes being consumed and almost always it is related to something in the the way TSM is being run/managed. In regards to 3rd party products, there are several products out there that may help with predicting what your resource utilization will be. However, the one I think you should look at first is Servergraph. It sounds like you have a very large TSM environment and Servergraph works very well in large multi-server environments. It has some very good trend analysis features as well. In particular, it has a feature where it predicts when a storage pool is going to run out of resources. I think this could be used to assist you in forecasting when tape purchases would be needed. I want to reiterate, unless you have a constantly growing amount of data your tape utilization should not continue to grow. I highly recommend that you review your entire TSM environment to see if there is a fixable reason for your tape consumption. If you would like to discuss this in detail off line please feel free to send me an email directly and we can arrange for a conversation. -- Regards, Mark D. Rodriguez President MDR Consulting, Inc. =============================================================================== MDR Consulting The very best in Technical Training and Consulting. IBM Advanced Business Partner SAIR Linux and GNU Authorized Center for Education IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert, CATE AIX Support and Performance Tuning, RS6000 SP, TSM/ADSM and Linux Red Hat Certified Engineer, RHCE =============================================================================== Etchison, Jim (SBS US) wrote:
Greetings, This is my first posting to this list, so please forgive me if this is not the right type of question or the right group to ask. I am currently a Client Manager for a large corporation that uses TSM as its backup solution. TSM seems to be working very well for my client, with one glaring exception: tape usage forecasting. On a number of occasions I have had to "surprise" my client by telling them they needed to buy thousands of more tapes. The first few times this has been forgiven, but with each successive request, they have gotten more and more irritated. From what I have been told by my Storage Manager, TSM does not have any Tape Forecasting capabilities. But from a business standpoint, this is a very real need because it is a substantial cost. At this point I am left with no option but to continue suprising my customer, which is not a career-enhancing choice. :) My question is this: how have others resolved this dilemma? Is there an add-on product that can be purchased that might solve this? Any help would be welcome. Thanks!
