Monday, November 24, 2008

LAN-Free Unknown Feature

My boss brought this article to my attention so I thought I would pass it on. It discusses an unknown or little discussed capability of LAN-Free to act as a "pass-thru" server for other clients. In other words a normal client can connect to TSM through the LAN-Free agent that resides on another server. Basically the Storage Agent becomes a dummy TSM server. This can be helpful when you have backups that need to go to tape directly but the network connection between the client and the TSM server is hurt by inadequate bandwidth between switches, or firewall issues. You can check the article out here. I remember seeing this discussed on ADSM.org before, but have never attempted to try it.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Texas Government Pulls Plug on IBM

Well if you get a chance check out this article on ZDnet. It looks like IBM is losing the Texas government account due to backup failures and lost data. Having previously worked for IBM what I would like to know is what is not being said. When IBM takes over an account on an outsourcing deal they have to assume the horrible practices already in place then do their best to convert to a better software/hardware solution and processes. For example when I was with IBM we had a remote site that was using Arcserve for their backups and had two weeks worth of tapes. A couple months into the contract they lost a server and needed to restore the data and guess what...they couldn't. The process in place was for them to rotate two weeks worth of tapes continually. The tapes were four to five years old and had never been tested. They found out after the fact that the tapes had gone bad some time in the past and they were pretty much out of luck. Is this IBM's fault? They took some of the blame even though IBM was only a couple months into the contract and the smaller remote sites were secondary in the process change timeline.

The Monring News did report the following:

In a Nov. 3 letter to the governor’s office, IBM acknowledges the company overreached by assuming responsibility for existing technological conditions that are inadequate, inconsistent and not sustainable.