Why “free” is not a good deal
You’ve likely heard the expression “you get what you pay for” and this holds true for tape support in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). While TSM comes with built-in support for tape at no additional cost you aren’t getting a whole lot of functionality either. Here’s how it shakes out…
What you get out of the box
TSM provides the following basic support for all tape libraries out of the box:
- Tape library sharing (media and drives)
- Support for a single device path to each tape drive
- Automatic labeling and relabeling of tape media
- Automatic device path discovery with specific SAN HBAs
If you are using an IBM tape library with the IBM Atape driver running on AIX (notice the dependencies here) you get a bit more functionality:
- HBA load balancing
- Data path failover
What you don’t get
- The ability to expand slot count on demand without restarting TSM
- Support for an unlimited number of HBAs
- Support for an unlimited number of data paths to a single tape drive
- HBA load balancing for any non-IBM tape device on any OS other than AIX
- Data path failover for any non-IBM tape device on any OS other than AIX
- Persistent binding of tape device paths irrespective of HBA type
- Tape library sharing without any dependencies on a single tape library management server
- Automatic clearing of tape media from drives following a failed dismount request
- Consolidation of multiple tape libraries into a single logical library
- On demand allocation of tape media (i.e. tape thin provisioning)
- Mount time minimization / data access acceleration
- Support for logical tape library partitioning
- Support for multiple scratch tape pools
Choice
It all comes down to choice. As you can see from the information above, IBM provides you with the bare minimum features you need to use tape in your TSM environment – no more, no less. For leading organizations basic doesn’t cut it. Companies who are surpassing their competition expect the highest reliability, greatest flexibility and optimal performance from their tape environment at all times. This is driven by a need to consistently meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while minimizing operating costs. They succeed because they don’t simply take what comes in the box but rather invest in solutions that deliver their business objectives. That is why products like EDT exist and are currently used by many of the world’s most successful and progressive companies.
Here are a just a few of the things that our clients have told us about how EDT has improved tape management and performance in their environment…
“[we are] delighted to have EDT 10 and eliminate the pain of device management in LAN-Free environments”
— A Top 5 Global Wireless Provider
“v10 has great features and possibilities with huge benefits. EDT v10 will be key to our tape operations in the future.”
– European Bank
“We use EDT v10 to manage our ACSLS and Quantum FC attached tape libraries. EDT gives us a simple approach to managing all our tape libraries that saves us time.”
– Healthcare Company
Download a copy of our document EDT TSM Enhancements to learn more.
