+1 on the challenge!! We were audited, and what a nightmare at first. They tried to charge us for boxes that had been retired, but were unlocked for legal restore reasons, they also tried to inflate the cost of clustered boxes and TDP setups. You only have to pay for cores on the ACTIVE nodes of a cluster. Now if both are active then you pay for both, but if you run, as we do, active/passive clusters you only pay for the node with the higher number of cpu/cores. At times our passive node will not have the resources assigned to it the primary node has.
I kept challenging and pushing back on them, and they finally sent me to another crew that had more sense. Once we agreed that IBM's licensing statements were valid because that's what we used to purchase, things were good. We even had a few extra. Not only that, but despite their assertions you DO NOT have to buy your licenses from them, you can get a quote and buy from your normal reseller so your normal discounts apply. See Ya' Howard Coles Jr. John 3:16! -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Remco Post Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 4:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] alternatives to TSM due to license costs On 30 dec 2009, at 20:11, woodbm wrote: > 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. > there are a few products that people try to compare TSM to; Networker, Netbackup and CommVault come to mind. Keep in mind that all of these require full backups at some interval, occupying much more tape that TSM does. So when presenting alternatives, do not only consider licensing cost but also the cost of media, servers, network etc. Also keep in mind that some products are disk to tape only, requiring you to have at least one tape drive for each concurrent backup/restore session, or implement expensive VTL solutions while TSM doesn't need one. (The IBM VTS for the mainframe was running ADSM for a reason!). Licensing schemes for these products are completely different. While IBM charges for cpu's, competitors also charge for functionality, such as archiving? drm? The number of volumes you can manage in a library? The number of drives? etc. Look into what you need and make sure you have the total picture. As a word of advise, make sure that the audit is correct. I've seen IBM try to charge customers for TDP for databases for DB2, while everybody knows that there is no such product! If in doubt, challenge the audit results, this might be worth the effort. > Thanks much, > Bryan > > +---------------------------------------------------------------------- > |This was sent by [email protected] via Backup Central. > |Forward SPAM to [email protected]. > +---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards, Remco Post [email protected] +31 6 248 21 622
