IBM hardware, IBM software (at least AIX in our case, and you probably realise what MS backup solutions are like!) so it must be less hassle to use an IBM backup solution, oh, and it works as well as anything else out there.
As IBM provide just about all hardware and software solutions (i, p, z, x - MS windows, oh and linux / UNIX on all of the above) they are in a good position to provide a good backup solution for all of their products (that is why IBM bought Tivoli - the T in TSM).
You could go to some other vendor but what real experience would they have in a real enterprise backup solution? They might be good on a backup program for a few platforms, or they might specialise in tape solutions and punt some other companies software but I think only TSM (ideally with an IBM storage solution behind it) can handle all the stuff you are likely to need to backup if you have any kind of complex environment.
AIX TSM server, backed up by a 34xx or 35xx library and you can securely backup just about anything and stand a good chance or recovering it as well!
There was an investigation into industry backup strategy / solutions a few (maybe more than a few by now - I can't believe how old I have gotten recently) years ago and they reckoned only 50% of companies have a viable backup solution and of those only 50% (we are down to 25% by now, 50% of 50% is 25%) stand a good chance of actually being able to utilise those backups.
Now (these days) most important systems are backed up in some form or another but that is only worth spending the time on if you actually stand a chance of being able to use that backup.
i.e. you backup your system over the network to a SAN / TSM solution, brilliant.
How do you restore from a SAN attached tape drive?
Well you can’t boot from it so you install the OS from mksysb - oh, that is in the SAN tape drive which you can't boot from, so you do a base install from CD, where is the CD when you have driven 200 miles in the middle of a wet night to get to the machine, of course the Base AIX CDs are in your desk, 20 minutes from where you started....
So you install the OS and get it on the network but the CDs you used are 5.x-ML3 and your mksysb image is too big to boot and at 5.x ML5 so you can't even do a migration, useless.
Think damned hard before you spend thousands on a solution that at best will only allow you to restore a few files!
