First, my response is aimed at giving you some ammo to use in meetings, not aimed at shooting the messenger.
Since the licensing is such a small part of what you pay to maintain a backup environment, moving to another backup product purely on that is absolutely a wrong decision. The cost of a backup environment comes from a number of things, not the least of which is cost of operation. If your backup environment is stable and you're meeting your RTO/RPO objectives, then switching to another product just because its licensing is cheaper is a sure-fire way to create instabilities and recovery failures. I'm not saying that this would be EMC/NetWorker's fault, I'm saying that switching backup products is a HUGE undertaking with a very steep learning curve and will undoubtedly result in instability for an indeterminate amount of time. (It will also cost quite a bit, completely negating the original reason for switching.) This is especially true when switching to/from TSM. It's very hard to mentally switch from the versions method that TSM uses to the grandfather/father/son methods of other products and vice versa. If you said "we have this requirement and we've consulted both IBM and independent TSM experts and they all tell us TSM can't do it," then I'd say see if another product can do it. But that's, of course, not what you're saying. I agree with another respondent that said use this position to renegotiate pricing with IBM. --- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Schneider, John Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 9:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM vs. Legato Networker Comparison Greetings, We have been a TSM shop for many years, but EMC came to our management with a proposal to replace our TSM licenses with Legato Networker, at a better price than what we are paying for TSM today. This came right on the heels of paying our large TSM license bill, and so it got management's attention. We have an infrastructure of 15 TSM servers and about 1000 clients, so this would be a large and painful migration. It would also require a great deal of new hardware and consultant costs during the migration, which would detract from the cost savings. So instead of jumping from one backup product to another based on price alone, we have been asked to do an evaluation between the two products. Do any of you have any feature comparisons between the two products that would give me a head start? Best Regards, John D. Schneider Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
