SaskEnergy’s implementation of TSM is a shining example of the power of TSM. When deployed properly, TSM and a few similar products orchestrate backup and archive using a combination of disk, tape, and policies. Data or copies of data shuttle from disk to tape and vice versa almost seamlessly.
Tape is certainly not dead at SaskEnergy, and vendors should take note. Moreover, they need to look at their future and integrate tape as part of disk and disk as part of tape. Instead of dedicated appliances, envision a Tier 3 storage management framework that includes disk, VTLs, data dedupe, tape backup,and archive to tape, and evolves to support the broad spectrum of backup and archiving applications. Tape suppliers need to include non-tape technologies in their visions. Disk suppliers need to recognize that the economics of tape continue to be compelling and solve real customer problems. Tape and disk systems should be combined to leverage complimentary strengths. All of this must eventually be integrated into a complete stack. Another message to vendors is perpetual backup is a requirement.
However, TSM is renowned for its complexity and requires accomplished experts to tweak thousands of options to get it functioning to requirements. As one user put it: ”It works; it works great; but I never want to do that again.” TSM also consumes a lot of hardware resources, particularly disk for its storage pools/cache. Other similar products suffer from this complexity and high resource consumption and require similar levels of expertise.
Action Item: Users should be pushing vendors toward a solution that integrates a variety of data protection technologies (e.g. disk, tape, de-dupe, etc) with sets of clearly defined standards. Vendors need a vision and roadmap encompassing such a solution and one that keeps it simple.
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