Friday, November 30, 2007

Recovery

It's not about backup, it's about recovery. Let's take a look at a few articles that can help you protect your TSM environment. You're backup solution is no good if you can't recovery from a disaster. These articles are based on Windows.

http://ryanpartington.com/article/tsmdaily/
Working through your daily tasks should look something like this, ensuring you have an offsite copy of your primary pools.

Once you're happy with your daily tasks, schedule a test server recovery exercise every quarter. This will allow you to optimise your processes and resolve any potential stumbling blocks. The following two articles look at recovering the server.
http://ryanpartington.com/article/tsmdisaster/ - Step by step text
http://ryanpartington.com/article/tsmrecovery/ - Step by step videos (posted earlier this week)

Any comments welcome
Thanks

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Blog Links

If you have a blog that posts TSM related subjects and issues send me an e-mail and I'll link to it under my new TSM Related Blogs link list. It doesn't have to be 100% TSM, but I would like the links to have at least 50% TSM and storage related topics. You can e-mail me through my contact info on the right under About The Admin.

Good TSM Recovery Videos

Ryan Partington has posted some really good TSM Server Recovery walk through videos on his website. The videos are around 40 minutes total in length and can help those of you who have never gone through this situation on procedures to follow. I've posted the first video and you can find the others here. Leave comments below on what other video tutorials you'd like to see.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

TSM Sharepoint TDP

Has anyone used the Sharepoint TDP for TSM yet? I have a number of Sharepoint servers at work and would like to know what users thoughts are on its capabilities. Is it easy to use or a nightmare to implement? Does it backup well or is it slow? Does it adversely affect the systems performance? If anyone can give me some feedback I'd appreciate it.

Friday, November 16, 2007

TSM 5.5 Available Today + TSM 5.4 Upgrade (or not) + The End is Nigh for TSM 5.3

Howdy folks,

Further to Chad's post, here's the full announcement on www.ibm.com (worth a look as it's pretty comprehensive):

>>> http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=877&letternum=ENUSZP07-0476


(I spy this link is also hidden away in one of the comments below)

TSM 5.5 is available for download for Passport Advantage customers as of today (Friday 16th of November 2007), and media is available from 14th December 2007.

There's also an IBM Redbook for TSM 5.5 being written at this very moment and there's likely to be a draft available mid-December (thanks for the info Craig).

Finally for now, it's worth noting that after a touch over three years in service, TSM 5.3 goes out of support at the end of April 2008 - time to exercise those upgrade muscles as I'm sure many shops haven't even taken the leap up to TSM 5.4 yet.
However, if this all seems too daunting too soon, I understand that IBM are offering extended support for 5.3 for two further years (at cost).
Over and out...

David McClelland
London, UK

Thursday, November 15, 2007

TSM Job in LA

TSM Engineer

6 month contract to hire

Up to $105,000 perm salary

- Candidate will be part of the Engineering (Technical Services) group

- The main characteristic of the candidate they are looking for is troubleshooting and the desire to find problems and fix them.

- Skills needed in addition to traditional TSM admin experience;

1. Tivoli Data Protection (TDP) is the #1 skill they are looking for. TDP is Tivoli module that helps back up databases such as SQL and UDB. The client has approximately 50TB a night in database info that needs to be backed up.

2. Server Migration Experience. The client is moving some mainframe based TSM over to a Unix platform. They will also be upgrading some of their older Unix servers to new ones so server migration experience is very important to them.

3. NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol)

4. NAS backups. Currently, their NAS is not mirrored.

- Client currently has 13 TSM servers and is looking to have as many as 30 by the end of next year

- LA facility has 3 servers moving to 7

- Candidate will be on 7/24 oncall rotation once every 8 weeks.

- Candidate will work 45-50 hours per week.

David Schnurr
866-491-0601 toll free
918-491-0800 fax
dschnurr@gdhconsulting.com
http://www.gdhconsulting.com/

Let Them Know You Saw The Post On TSMExpert.org!

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

TSM 5.5 Added Features

Looks like 5.5 is due out sometime soon and IBM has released some of the features that will be available with the update. Still waiting on some change to the ISC but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon. The following is from the aritcle which can be read here and another more thurough one from CNN Money is here.

TSM 5.5 includes integrated key management for encrypted backups, support for VMware's Consolidated Backup option (VCB), snapshot support for Microsoft applications, the ability to do multiple simultaneous restores on sequential disk and the ability to restart the movement of TSM instances from one server to another.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

TSMExpert.org


I have purchased the TSMExpert.org domain and will be switching the site to that address within the week. The current site address will forward to the new address. Basically the site should stay the same (it will still be hosted by Google) but the new address should make the site easier to find and index by the large search engines. If you have questions or concerns please feel free to let me know.