Thursday, January 31, 2013

Tivoli Storage Manager Next Administrative Interface / Beta Programme

It'll be called: Operations Center (a bit sounds like admincenter ;-) I hope they didn't only change the design!

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Upgrading A TSM 5.5 Library Manager to 6.x

I just helped (sort of) perform an upgrade of two TSM library managers from TSM 5.5 to TSM 6.2. First off I'd like to say that the process involved was really not worth the time it took. Our library manager had a 1GB DB and contained no client data. When the library controller contains no client data you can easily move from 5.x to 6.x without all the headaches of a DB upgrade through the extract and insert process (which took 1 hour to complete once we started the insert). Here are the basic steps to easily upgrade a TSM library manager:
  • Backup the TSM library manager DB
  • Backup Volhist and Devconfig
  • Copy all define statements from devconfig into a TSM macro
  • Uninstall TSM 5.5
  • Install TSM 6.x
  • Follow the steps to create a new TSM 6.x server
  • Start the TSM 6.x server
  • Run the macro to redefine all the servers, devclasses, libraries, drives, and paths
  • Check-in the tapes to the library
  • Run audit library from each of the library clients
It might seem like a lot, but once you've got the TSM 6.x server up and running, defining the other items is easy and will take a lot less time than running the upgrade process.

NOTE: This only works if you do not perform ANY backups (Client or NAS) to the library manager.

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Do Large Corporations Need Tape?

I am dealing with a situation where I have to gone from a tapeless TSM environment to the standard TSM tape model and I have to wonder why you would use tape when you have multiple data centers? If you have multiple data centers why not backup to disk and replicate the data on disk to a disk solution at the alternate DC? I did this with Data Domains and it made life so much easier. Multiple DR tests showed it was efficient and successful, of course this also utilized deduplication so disk usage and costs didn't get out of hand.  So I ask why is any large corporation still using tape?