IBM System Storage Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM System Storage products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas

  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Add a new idea Subscribe
Status Not under consideration
Workspace Storage Protect Family
Categories Spectrum Protect (Server)
Created by Guest
Created on Feb 15, 2013

RELATED IDEAS

resource aware scheduling in TSM

I work with TSM for 9 years and the biggest TSM's weakness I found is the scheduling. All the large environments I worked on used some external scheduling application like TWS or Control-M to be able to keep the resources under control. The problem is that TSM server is not aware about it's own resources (tape drives, maximum sessions, file device class drives). The TSM admin has no possibility to control the backups and TSM server internal jobs in relation to resources. Many TSM admins tend to start more backup jobs or TSM internal processes, just to make sure all resources will be utilized. But that very often leads to overloading of some resources and thus slowing down the jobs. This is especially true in environments with tens of tape drives and hundreds - thousands of backup jobs.
I would like to see an enhancement to the TSM scheduling to be able to define resources such as tape drives, sessions, resource for disk pool (limiting the number of jobs in a way that the disk storage will be ideally utilized). External tools like IBM TWS or CTM can do this but having this feature inside of TSM server would be much better. The resources defined in the external tools are purely virtual and the tool has no possibility of checking how many resources are really actually free inside TSM.
TSM server could be very easily aware of it's own resources and help to utilize them in a much smarter and efficient way. That would save not only administration effort but mainly harware costs, reduce backup times, TSM internal process times, etc...
It could also automatically reduce the resource count in case when drive is set offline.

The resources could be also used in case the TSM administrator would like to stop all activity on the TSM server. Imagine a scenario where you have a TSM server housekeeping running, client backups running too, and you need to stop the TSM server instance for a maintenance. It would require to reschedule backups and manually cancel many processes. Wouldn't it be much easier and elegant just to set the resource count to 0 and wait for the current backups/processes to finish. New backups/processes will not be started because there will be no resources for them.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 12, 2015

    Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
    Brand - Servers and Systems Software
    Product family - Storage
    Product - Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Family

    For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
    Brand - Tivoli
    Product family - Storage
    Product - Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Family

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 17, 2014

    Very good request, I support en environment with over 300 Tape drives and we are currently developing external scripts to do exactly this but it would of course be much better if TSM could do this out of the box like you can expect from enterprise software.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 30, 2013

    Thank you for submitting the request. This is a recognized requirement, your comments are helpful in understanding the requirement and a solution appears to be desirable. This request is not in a committed release plan for next year,
    but the theme is aligned with our multi-year strategy, and will be a candidate for our future release. This will be one of the topics we will discuss with the Early Access Program participate for next year. IBM’s plans may change and no commitment is made that a solution will be provided.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Apr 10, 2013

    Fully supporting this idea, this functionality would benefit to better plan Backups and Restore operation including maintenance it self. Specially when environment is designed with not to many tape drives and all operation has to be planned very carefully

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 26, 2013

    Great suggestion. We have 180 tapedrives in our environment and such an internal TSM 'resource scheduling' would be great. We struggle a lot to be able to run reclamation in an efficient way.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 25, 2013

    hello,
    I would like to have an option in define clientaction to actualy be able to shorten the duration window from default 5 days to hours. Maybe i am just blind, really i have not seen this possibility.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 25, 2013

    I support this too. Anything which can help tune the workload which TSM has incoming each day would be useful and would save management resource. In particular, if a restore is started then that could be taken into account scheduling backups rather than TSM Admins cancelling backups.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 22, 2013

    Indeed! I fully support this thought to gain much better overview regarding idle resources. It would help significantly to process more jobs using the same hardware. Consider the benefits of this sophisticated enhancement in global scale.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 22, 2013

    Indeed! I fully support this thought to gain much better overview regarding idle resources. It would help significantly to process more jobs using the same hardware. Consider the benefits of this sophisticated enhancement in global scale.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 18, 2013

    I am all for more intelligent TSM scheduling removing the requirement to use 3rd party products to do this. Also the use of resource utilization to stop tape mounts is an enhancement I am fully in favour of as it can take me up to 30 mins to stop all newly starting tape mounts across multiple tsm servers when attempting to shut down the library for maintenance.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Feb 18, 2013

    An excellent idea which reflects the sentiment of many TSM specialists I have spoken to over the years. We need to remove the dependency on bespoke scripts to augment the management of TSM and remove the perception that it is not a complete product in it's own right. Resource aware, "intelligent" scheduling would address a large number of scenarios where this is necessary.

By clicking the "Post Comment" or "Submit Idea" button, you are agreeing to the IBM Ideas Portal Terms of Use.
Do not place IBM confidential, company confidential, or personal information into any field.