TSM has tight integration with other products in the IBM portfolio.
TSM provides a lot of flexibility to interface with various storage targets primarily focusing on tape installations. If there is a prior investment in tapes, Tivoli can help leverage that as primary backup storage.
TSM has a lot of agents for different operating systems and applications.
Tivoli provides a very rich Application Programming Interface (API) and toolsets for those storage specialists who want to write their own scripts and software and stitch together a data protection solution to best fit the organizations needs.
Primary Disadvantages of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager:
TSM licensing fees tend to be expensive for growing businesses due to the licensing model – charging on a per-feature, per-client, per-operating system, and the like basis.
TSM tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to higher operational expenses of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, and disaster recovery) software.
The non-integrated nature of TSM leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection (backup, archiving, disaster recovery) software vendors when a problem occurs.
TSM’s focus on flexibility by providing utilities and API for the product dramatically increases the complexity of the solution.
Setting up TSM for deduplication can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the TSM software will operate.
TSM does not support integrated fixed/rotational archiving.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression and/or encryption) using TSM on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
TSM does not provide off-site and cloud-based disaster recovery solutions.
