Backup Solution Migration Arcserv to TSM

[halomerchant]

Hello Everyone,
First off I'd like to thank each and every one of you for your technical expertise. I have confided in this site to get me through some monster problems since the vendor's site and support has been terrible. I have recently been promoted to the enterprise backup engineer of my company. My last position as a backup admin was extensive experience with EMC EDM on a SuN host. I am now working with a v10 Brightstore Arcserv solution that to me is fast but absolutely horrible in the application. Too buggy, bombs out for no reason, and is extremely hard to customize reports, managers, etc. The company wants me to migrate the entire solution to TSM as soon as possible however I have no experience or training in TSM and I am looking to get help here. Can anyone recommend the best crash course to learn TSM to get me going.

The environment: We currently run all our mainframe backups over TSM and API backups for AIX servers but we're only backing up databases at this time. I administer 200 windows servers 2000/2003, 15 Novell servers all 4.11, and 15 Unix/Linux backups. These are all currently backed up over Arcserv. I have had so much difficulty in working with the vendor support. Many of them do not communicate well in english, cannot understand problems outside of scripting, and have difficulty listening to my problem. They always suggest making changes in a production environment that would adversely effect our users so I want to get migrated like now! I am not really sure where or how to start migrating my servers over to TSM. The person who currently administers the mainframe backups doesn't have a clue about win/novell backups or configuration so I have to figure this stuff out ground up. The CIO would also like to get TSM configured to our SAN to improve speed and performance. The SAN is 7TB in size and can be utilized any way possible. Lastly, will the storagetek library we use for arcserv work with TSM?Any help or expertise is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.
halomerchant

 

[birky]

Hi halomerchant

You will definately have to go on a training course aimed at TSM as I found it to be one of the most complex backup solutions out there...I know guys at a large financial institution who have been using it for 6 months and are just abut getting there heads around it.

Good luck, I think you have got a very busy time ahead of you looking at the environment that you are working in.

 

[Yrrk]

I echo birky's suggestion. Sign up for formal IBM training ASAP. Expect it to take at least 6 months to become comfortable with TSM if you are going to administer the server side as well as the client side.

Best crash course suggestion I can offer is to read some of IBM's excellent guides:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/index.jsp

download and read the administrators guide in particular for your respective TSM server OS flavor. Also the client guides for any clients you intend on deploying. The guides related to any databases you'll be backing up (exchange/notes/db2/etc)

Best resource for asking questions amongst other TSM experts (subscribe to ADSM listserv):

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/sysmgmt/products/support/Tivoli_Communities.html