I have heard it often of TSM administrators wondering why the TSM reclamation process is slow & clumsy process. The good part most of these administrators is that they understand the importance of reclamation & how it help their backup become more efficient & save on tapes, though they still wonder why it takes too longs. I had decided to give my point of view on this.

1- One of the main reasons for the reclamation process to be slow is that you don’t have enough tape drives. If you have only one tape drive into your library then you can have a seriously slow & none efficient reclamation process, as each time you need to reclaim a tape, TSM will have to copy the full tape to the disk, then reclaim the volume on the disk to another tap.…

For those who want to get certified on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, below is the Certification & Training Path for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 directly from IBM. So start up your trip today toward being certified :).

OK, you are not ready for the certification & can’t afford paying for the official IBM courses you can start by reading our rich tutorials for free today, though nothing can be as good as the official course so keep it in mind. Our tutorial has been established as many people are finding difficulties in learning or finding a good resource for TSM. So we hoped that we can help the words of this great product.

OK, as a gift from us as well if you already know TSM & you only want to prepare for the exam then you can find the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager V5.4 Certification Study Guide here.…

TSM Symposium event which used to be held every two years by Oxford University between 1999 – 2007. These events were very usefull with the wide range content discussed at it. It always predicted and scoped the TSM features available and predict up to two years of enhancements. They had always posted their presentation online to ensure people get the value of it over time instead of dying with the end of the event. Check the presentation from the past 5 events at: TSM Symposium events …

Seems the post title has got your attention. Well guess what it will not take you even 20 minutes to go through the post below, but it will still give you a head out in TSM SQL Query that people who had used TSM for many years have not grasped yet. Its funny to know how many TSM admin I see on daily basis who ask me the same famous question “What SQL  select statement that shows me…”. As I had been answering many of these lately, I had decided to share with you how these are built up. If you are new to TSM you would ask your self why do I need these, then the easy answer is that you can easily figure out almost anything in TSM using SQL queries.…

A question that frequently come up by TSM Admins that “how to move Nodes to a new Domain?” This is usually the case when you had grouped several nodes under one domain then you needed to change the backup policies for few of them, so you find out the need to move these few nodes to a new policy Domain. Below is a high view of the steps to Move Nodes to a new TSM Domain:

1. Define the following… New Policy domain, policy set, related sequential and copy stgpools, management class(es), copy group(s)

2. Assign new management class as default management class

3. Validate and activate new policy set

4. Update node to reflect domain change

5. Update associated client backup jobs by copying the old schedule(s) to new domain, update new schedule(s) accordingly, associate copied schedule(s) to updated nodes, delete old schedule(s) from old domain.…

If you got TSM or any other backup solution connected to a tape library or even a single Tape Drive you might get lucky and see one of the Industry Standard Tape Alert Errors. Although these had nothing to do with the backup software you are using. I mean you might be using TSM, Veritas, brightstore or any other backup software and end up with the same standard error message. As these errors are highly related to your tape drive/library Hardware problem or a connectivity problem to your backup server. So no matter what backup software you are using the below Industry Standard Tape Alert Error Flags Might be helpful to you. If you are a TSM implementer please book mark this page as you will never know when you are going to face these errors and then the below list will be invaluable.…

As the installation of TSM on Debian might not be an easy task for the average  Joe administrator, I thought I will share the automation script I am usually using install TSM on Debian. Actually this script was written for Ubuntu 6.10 by Written by Thomas McCosker 29-06-2007, Sydney Australia – thomas.mccosker@gmail.com. I had been using this shell script for a while and it works great every time :). A lot of my clients are using it as well by now. So a let’s start by a big thanks to Thomas.

Ah you might wonder why my client or I still using Ubuntu 6.10 as many newer releases came up. The answer is simple its slim enough that it will fly on our old machines & quite stable.…