text:
Storwize is a trademark of Storwize Inc., an IBM company, and used under license by IBM.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Cost Effective Disaster Recovery for IBM Storwize V7000 Midrange Storage
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October 7, 2010
IBM today announced the upcoming availability of the IBM Storwize V7000, a groundbreaking new midrange storage system. This new solution brings enterprise-class functionality, scalability and management to the midmarket at an attractive price point. All of the storage built into the Storwize V7000 is virtualized, and it can also be extended to virtualize other storage systems in your environment, to leverage your investment in them while simplifying storage management and improving utilization. Cha-ching!
See the IBM Storwize V7000 announcement here
As customers begin to evaluate and deploy the Storwize V7000, they will naturally look at options for protecting the business critical data that they will be storing on it. The system has built-in FlashCopy® snapshot software, and is available with metro and global mirroring software for high availability and disaster recovery.
These replication solutions are priced aggressively, however they rely on expensive fibre-based networks to transfer data. These network connections can be quite expensive, especially for midsized businesses, and IBM has another, more cost-effective solution available for off-site disaster recovery.
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack will selectively replicate Windows and Linux application data from your IBM Storwize V7000 to another location, anywhere in the world, over IP-based (WAN, Internet, Intranet) networks. FastBack's block-level incremental-forever data capture, with built-in data deduplication, is highly network bandwidth efficient. And since it performs its data acquisition in the background, as often as needed to support tight Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), there is no backup window to concern yourself with.
In addition to using FastBack for cost-effective, IP-based disaster recovery, you can leverage FastBack's local, near-instant recovery capabilities to restore files, databases, or even entire volumes following almost any type data loss.
For more information of Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, please visit:
To download a free 60-day trial version of TSM FastBack, register here.
Storwize is a trademark of Storwize Inc., an IBM company, and used under license by IBM.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Remote Office Data Deduplication and more
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Announcing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack v6.1.1
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is an advanced continuous data protection and near-instant recovery software solution for business-critical Windows and Linux servers in the data center, remote offices and small- to mid-sized enterprises. Customers use Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack to help reduce the amount of data at risk between backups to almost zero, and to reduce the time to recover from almost any data loss to just seconds. TSM FastBack also includes built-in target-side data deduplication; all of this adds up to reducing the costs of storage, bandwidth and administration. Optional add-ons include Bare Machine Recovery to quickly restore the operating system volume to similar, dissimilar and virtual hardware; and granular recovery of individual e-mail objects from Microsoft Exchange.
On July 30, 2010, IBM released Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack v6.1.1 which includes data deduplication across FastBack Servers and locations when consolidating remote office backup to a central Tivoli Storage Manager Server. These enhancements further improve backup and disaster recovery performance, cut costs, and expand on FastBack integration with Tivoli Storage Manager to provide a true Unified Recovery Management platform.
Also in this new release are: support for Microsoft Exchange 2010, including granular e-mail object recovery in TSM FastBack for Microsoft Exchange; doubling the amount of data that a FastBack server can protect; extending near-instant restore capability to Linux volumes; and many other performance and ease-of-use improvements.
For more information, please visit http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage/storage-mgr-fastback/
TSM Fastback + Juniper WAN Optimization = fast remote backups
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Juniper Networks recently published a solution brief regarding the performance boost you get from using TSM Fastback in concert with their WAN optimization (WXC). The value proposition is pretty straightforward: reduced backup times and reduced WAN bandwidth and cost. You can read the full details in the report, but here are a few snippets worth noting:
Conceptual view of the bandwidth savings ...
Savings of backing up 92GB over a 155Mbps link with 100 ms latency:
These savings are above and beyond those you already get with using TSM Fastback (taken from solution brief):
TSM Fastback is a solution that has seen strong adoption from customers with remote offices ... If backup times or bandwidth usage over a WAN are a concern, I suggest you look into the WXC offering from Juniper Networks in concert with TSM Fastback.
Data Protection in a virtual world - Part 1
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on my previous blog i've discussed some of the viable approaches to data protection with virtual machines, before i dwell into the pros and cons of each approach i'd like to discuss the fundamental differences between file level and block level backup (and solicit your input :-) ).
Encapsulation is one of the basic rules for software design, simply put, it's the computer geek's equivalent of the famous "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. The idea is pretty simple, let's assume our File System is component A and our Disk System is component B. Component A and B publish a public interface that others can use, but they hide their internal mechanisms from the other components. This enables us to do some nifty tricks, such as RAID, as far as the file system is concerned it is working with a "regular disk", it is unaware of the fact that our disk system had actually taken the 100GB disk space that we defined and partitioned it into multiple strips that are actually located across 5 different disks in order to provide it (the FS) with better performance and hardware fault tolerant. There are other ways where this principle is used but you have to agree that it comes in pretty handy.
But, why do i even mention "encapsulation", and how is that relevant to File VS Block level backups?
The point i am trying to make is that the Disk level is not aware of the "file contents"and the File System is not aware of the "disk layout", this actually dictates the pros and cons of those two very different approaches to data protection.
With file level backups it's really easy to define which files you want to protect, than when the time comes, someone has to access the files and move the data they contain to some sort of data repository, in order to do that you must deal with issues such as:
- Open files
- Interdependencies between multiple files
- Identifying which (sub)files have changed
- For structured data (databases etc.), do we backup the entire file (or file group) or only the portions that have changed?
Block level backups are usually pretty straight forward, there's a mechanism that keeps track of the changed in "realtime" (this usually enables CDP, but that's a whole different story) and when the time comes the data will be moved to the data repository, but this technology has its own challenges
- Minimum granularity is usually a volume
- Hard to exclude unused file data (page file?)
- Recovering files from a block level backup
- Communicating with applications (and File System) to ensure backup consistency.
Generally speaking block level backups have a "lower overhead" than file level backup, so, if you decided to virtualize your environment and keep using agents on the individual virtual machines, you would probably want to use a block level backup solution. File Level backups are still viable (especially if they skip the "indexing" process by using an FS filter or journaling and allow for "sub file" incremental backup), but you will need to be more careful when planning your backup windows in order to prevent VM sprawl.
Stay tuned, next we'll discuss other approaches such as proxy backups
VINCI PLC builds the future with IBM Storage
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VINCI PLC, based in Watford, UK, is the largest British arm of VINCI, the world's leading concession and construction group. The company operates in the sectors of building,
civil engineering, air, facilities and technology. VINCI PLC has in the region up to 4,000 employees and its annual turnover exceeds £1 billion.
Business need:
To consolidate several acquisitions and implement a new ERP system, VINCI PLC needed to extend its storage infrastructure and sought a reliable, flexible, easy-to-manage platform for handling rapid growth.
Read the complete
success stories of other customer implementations of IBM technologies
can be found
TSM customer success leveraging deduplication
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At the recent Gartner IOM 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida, I had the good fortune of listening to a series of interesting topics and meeting some really smart people. As one might have guessed, the bulk of the sessions focused on virtualization and cloud topics. But the one topic that piqued my interested was unrelated to virtualization and cloud - it was deduplication and was hosted by Dave Russell.
The intent of the session was to bring forward a some customer examples that were deploying deduplication technologies in their backup and recovery solutions. Most of you that read this blog know that deduplication and data reduction have been a hot topic in the industry. And as you likely know, almost every major vendor out there offers some form of deduplication with its associated benefits.
This session provided us two customers who were willing to talk about their experiences with deduplication and the benefits they've received. One customer is using CommVault and the other is using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v6 (TSM). While both customers showcased the quantified benefits from deduplication, the presentation from the TSM customer went beyond just the benefits of deduplication. The TSM customer revealed their quantified benefits and also identified some of the best practices they developed regarding deduplication.
This particular TSM customer is a large producer of natural gas in the U.S. The customers environment has TSM managing about 1.3 petabytes of data from over 1500+ nodes. Overall, their approach to managing backup storage is do it as efficiently as possible and to reduce the overall amount of backup data under management.
Prior to leveraging TSM deduplication, this customer began with "incremental forever" and compression. Once TSM v6 was released, they adopted deduplication at the server and client in concert with the other data reduction features provided by TSM.
As they began evaluating their use of deduplication, they had to deal with demands from their internal customers - DBA and Exchange admins like full backups etc. Furthermore, they had to consider how their rate of data change, evaluate retention policies, and ensure that their restore requirements weren't negatively impacted by the use of deduplication.
After significant testing and planning, the customer decided that they would initially deploy deduplication for their Oracle databases and Windows OS and system state backups. The results of using TSM deduplication were impressive ...
Oracle deduplication results - 75% reduction of Oracle backup data after deduplication. This was on 3.8TB of physical space on disk and about 15 TBs of data on tape.
And their results on Windows OS and System State were a whopping 94% ... taking them from 172GB of managed data down to 11.4 GB. In this scenario, the customer leveraged TSM 6.2 client- or source-side deduplication.
Overall, very impressive results. By leveraging the data reduction features within TSM, the customer was able to save by using less tapes library cells, tape drives, and disks.
In the end, the customer stated that TSM data reduction (with deduplication) helped them meet their objectives - efficiently reduce data under management. Furthermore, it allows them to reduce their overall HW costs and meet or improve restore requirements. The last comment the customer made before closing the session was that with all the various TSM data reduction capabilities in production, their job had ultimately gotten simpler now that their environment was running more efficiently ...
This is a fantastic story that I really enjoy sharing. If you are a TSM customer and have benefited from its data reduction technologies, then please give me a shout as I would like to hear your story as well.
Unified Recovery Management #1
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Unified Recovery Management for a Smarter Planet
Welcome to my new blog series which will focus on simplifying the lives of storage and backup administrators. In this first installment, of course, I'll start laying out the problem as I see it. Hopefully, you've seen all the many IBM Smarter Planet commercials on TV over the past year. The basic story is that the planet is smaller and flatter than it used to be, and is more connected economically, socially and technically. I don't think anyone would argue that information technology has dramatically changed the way people, businesses and governments interact across the planet.
This is because everything is becoming more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Cars are talking to sensors embedded in roads, mobile equipment is tracked via GPS, machines of all types are predicting the need for maintenance and calling home to schedule a service call, groceries are talking to store shelves, and intelligent power meters are reducing the waste in transmission systems.
As former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said in his keynote at Pulse2010 last month, "Traffic on the Internet is now dominated by things communicating with things, rather than people communicating with people".
The result of all this interconnectivity is the creation of enormous amounts of digital information – data. This data is being used for incredible things: finding cures for many diseases, finding oil and gas in new places, dynamically reducing traffic bottlenecks, preventing crime, and improving the delivery of health care – all while reducing costs. But what the commercials fail to mention is that someone has to manage all this data – it has to be stored, protected, available and reliable. The traditional response to data growth has been to throw more capacity at the problem, but this is no longer the 'green' thing to do. While the costs of storage capacity continue to decrease, the costs of housing, cooling and managing storage now consume the majority of most IT budgets. We need to find smarter ways to manage more data, ways that require less infrastructure, less power, less people, and yes, less money.
The environments that all of this data reside in are becoming incredibly complex, leading to an unmanageable patchwork of tools and processes that storage administrators have to use in order to attempt to meet the service level needs of their organizations. For example, the numbers of different hardware platforms, operating systems and applications are expanding (and of course each new application is more important than the last), while the places where data is being created and stored are multiplying. And way too many different things can go wrong, each demanding a different type of response.
I'll be diving deeper into this complexity in the next installment, and later in the series will describe what IBM is doing to help simplify your life. Get ready for the Smarter Planet, and for managing all the data that it's creating!
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Tivoli Storage Manager continues to take share in Q2!
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IBM posted Q2 results yesterday showing strong performance by the Tivoli brand. Here is an excerpt from the prepared remarks:
Of particular interest for this blog is the continued strength of the storage software portfolio:
Congrats to the team for their continued success ... looking forward to 2H 2010!
Asian Pacific hospital gains peace of mind with virtualized data protection
Tiffeni Woodhams 270001Q08F firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  ibmstorage storage-blog tivoli data-availability data-protection storage ibm healthcare virtualization 2.074 besøg
Working with IBM, a hospital in Asia Pacific gained a data protection solution that meets users' data availability requirements,
scales on demand to support a growing warehouse of patient data and medical images, and simplifies data migration and
data recovery tasks.
The benefits of the solution include a 50% reduction in backup window; restores individual Microsoft Exchange objects in minutes;
restores systems in under 10 minutes.
Read the complete case study to see how this Asian Pacific hospital gained peace of mind with virtualixed data protection from IBM.
More success stories of other customer implementations of IBM technologies can be found here
Advanced Recovery Capabilities for TSM Environments
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IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager FastBack v6.1.1
Advanced Recovery Capabilities for TSM Environments
Every IT environment contains applications that are critical to the operations and resilience of the organization. Real pain is experienced when these applications go off-line, or when the data that they rely on is lost or corrupted. Traditional once-per-day backup may be leaving too much new data at risk of loss, and current volume-level recovery processes only extend downtime as all the data is restored following a system failure or other disaster.
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack performs non-disruptive block-level backups for critical Microsoft® Windows and Linux® applications, in the background with no backup window, as often as needed to assure data protection that meets business requirements. And FastBack provides near-instant recovery of entire volumes, enabling immediate and transparent access to protected data even while it is restored in the background.
With the release of Version 6.1.1, TSM FastBack can now be completely integrated into your Tivoli Storage Manager environment. From the TSM Administration Console, FastBack can be launched and managed; you can set FastBack backup policies and initiate restore operations; you view FastBack reports; and you can backup the FastBack repository into the TSM Server for long-term data management and retention.
TSM FastBack's automation and ease-of-use make it an excellent choice for protecting and restoring Windows and Linux server data in remote and branch offices. With the new data deduplication capabilities included standard in FastBack v6.1.1, remote office data can now be efficiently and cost-effectively replicated over WAN to a central TSM Server. Fast and easy recovery can be accomplished in the remote office from the local FastBack Server, or in the central site from the TSM Server in disaster recovery situations. Your distributed data can now meet the same levels of protection and retention provided for your core applications through Tivoli Storage Manager.
Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is an integral member of the TSM Family, providing advanced data protection and recovery capabilities across the entire organization from a single administrator interface.
To learn more, please visit: www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage/storage-mgr-fastback/
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
TSM Protects Leading Supercomputer
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A new supercomputer at the University of Kentucky has placed it in the top 10 of public universities for compute power.
According to UK President Lee T. Todd Jr, "This supercomputer will allow our world-class researchers to discover new solutions to the complex problems facing the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world."
This new high-performance compute cluster comes with 200 terabytes of usable disk storage. This important data is protected by Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and Heirarchical Storage Manager (HSM) that is connected to the UK central backup system.
I'd like to congratulate UK on making it into the top 10 public university supercomputers. Lastly, I'd like thank them for selecting TSM to protect this critical infrastructure.
You can find the full report on the UK supercomputer at HPCwire.
Live Web Demos for FlashCopy Manager
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IBM will be providing a series of live web-based demonstrations dedicated to showing you the value of IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager. It will also show you how the product works. These will be DEMOS of live code.
Organizations seeking to improve protection for Business Critical Application Data can leverage Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager to simplify management through integration with IBM Storage Hardware Advanced Snapshot technology. As the first event in a series of Customer Web Conferences we will focus on demonstrating the features of Tivoli FlashCopy Manager for the Microsoft Exchange Environment.
Audience: IBM Customers and their associated IBM and Business Partner Sales representatives
Key Features of Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager include:
Hosts: John F. Miller, IBM North American Sales Executive
Neil Rasmussen, IBM Software Designer for Tivoli Software
Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager Demo Schedule
All calls will begin at 12noon ET for 1 Hour
Web Conference details:
Audio Conference Call details:
To learn more about IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, please visit:
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Enabling TSM Unified Recovery Management Replication
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In the IBM Thought Leadership Whitepaper,
Backing Up Millions of New Files - The Backup Window Challenge
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I recently saw an interesting cry for help on the Internet. A Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) customer had a situation where his company was creating millions of new files every day, and the process of scanning the file system to look for incremental files to back up was becoming a real issue.
Unified Recovery Management #5 - How IBM can Help
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Chapter 5: Unified Recovery Management – How IBM can Help
In my earlier postings on the topic of Unified Recovery Management (sorry for being away for so long), I laid out in excruciating
detail the complexity that is facing today's backup administrators: many different applications, on different hardware/OS platforms,
in different locations, with different recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO & RTO) to meet the operational requirements
of the organization.
In the last entry, I covered some of the many technologies that are available and widely used to address different aspects of this
complex issue. At the heart of the problem is, can any one backup administrator really have true visibility and control of the
entire data protection and recovery process when there are so many solutions and interfaces used.
IBM Software has been working for several years to address this challenge by bringing our various data protection software products
under the control of a single management interface, which is also common with many other IBM Tivoli software products.
The goals of this development initiative are: to manage the entire data protection and recovery infrastructure from a single
administrative interface; to unify the management of data within an integrated portfolio: and to understand where all the recovery
points are, manage them efficiently, and provide the interfaces to recover whatever data is needed, where ever it resides.
This interface is called the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP), and from it you can launch, monitor and manage the various Tivoli
Storage data protection and recovery software products:
simplifying management tasks.
A unified Recovery Management approach, such as offered by IBM, can:
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Count Down to Pulse 2010
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The count down is on... with only 2 weeks left to Pulse 2010, I wanted to give you and update on additional perks you'll have access to if you register and attend.
Meet the Experts!
Talk one-on-one with Product Experts
Visit the Expo!
Mid-Market Zone
Share Your Story
This year at Pulse 2010 we are scheduling video tape interviews with clients who are willing to share their thoughts on what they are doing to achieve visibility, control, and automation in their infrastructure. We will be filming client videos at Pulse starting Sunday, February 21, through Wednesday, February 24. The content will be used to produce short videos that we will leverage to tell the needs clients are addressing in their organizations. Our customers have been sharing their stories throughout 2009 as you can see below. Interested in participating? Notify me at email@example.com
VCU Health System works with IBM to gain uninterrupted data access
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VCU Medical Center is one of the leading academic medical centers in the United States and the only academic medical center in central Virginia, offering state-of-the art care in more than 200 specialty areas along with Level 1 trauma care.
Business need:
For VCU Health System, technology provides the foundation for transforming clinical services and delivering patient care. However, with a heterogeneous storage infrastructure and no single user interface, the team's three storage engineers faced significant hurdles in managing growing data volumes and recovering data quickly when needed.
Working with IBM, the health system implemented a virtualized, scalable and high-performance storage infrastructure that improves service levels, reduces costs, mitigates risks and supports an increasing amount of data (growing at more than 20 percent annually).
Reduced data recovery time; Process of migrating data has been shortened with greater success probability; Standardization and consolidation of storage systems has reduced the storage footprint and decreased data center temperatures from 43 to 68 degrees; lower cooling and energy cost; Reduced storage spending
"With Tivoli Storage Manager, we can set multiple recovery point objectives and the XIV allows us to keep multiple snapshots of the data without impacting performance. So we can have copies and copies and copies of the data where we couldn't before."
—Greg Johnson, CTO and Director, Technology & Engineering Services, VCU Health System
Read the complete case study for more details on how VCU Medical Center worked with IBM to gain uninterrupted data access.
More success stories of other customer implementations of IBM technologies can be found here.
6 Straight Quarters of Double-Digit Growth
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IBM Tivoli Storage Software ROCKS for the 6th Straight Quarter
IBM announced its second quarter earnings yesterday, 18 Jul 12, showing great results in very a difficult macro economic climate. In his remarks on the investor call, IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge specifically called out Tivoli Storage as a strong contributor to these results:
"In software this quarter, we had good growth in our business analytics and storage management offerings ... Tivoli software was up 6 percent at constant currency and gained share, driven by storage software growth of 13 percent at constant currency. Tivoli Storage Management continues to perform exceptionally well, growing double digits at constant currency for the sixth consecutive quarter ... Storage hardware revenue was flat at constant currency, with the value continuing to shift to software, as you saw with the ongoing success we're having in our Tivoli storage software offerings."
The success of Tivoli Storage Software is largely the result of the strong growth of the Tivoli Storage Manager family, our flagship data backup and unified recovery management platform. This is obviously a very competitive and highly saturated market segment - everybody has a backup solution in place - and it's a segment that is projected to grow only 8% this year. So why is Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) doing so well? We believe its because the requirements for data protection have changed dramatically over the past 3 to 5 years, and we've made the improvements to the product necessary to meet and stay ahead of those challenges.
1. Data is growing at 40% - 60% per year, and legacy backup software, especially those solutions that rely on adding media servers as they scale, cannot keep up with this growth. TSM has seen an 800% increase in it's scalability since 2009, now supporting up to 4 billion data objects in a single TSM server.
2. IT environments have become increasing complex, and important data assets are now created and managed in more places than ever before. Many companies have deployed a wide range of point solutions to handle the different requirements of key applications, virtual machines, remote offices, employee workstations, disaster recovery, etc., but this only brings in more cost and complexity to the point where you lose visibility and control of the overall data protection infrastructure. TSM, however, offers a true Unified Recovery Management platform that ties all of these advanced technologies together in a single user interface, making it easy to ensure everything is protected and can be recovered quickly when something goes wrong.
3. Costs are out of control - mostly due to points 1 and 2 above. Backup is really just an insurance policy - it doesn't add anything to the top line, so you want to spend as little on it as possible. To address this, we've added tons of new capabilities into TSM at no additional cost, including built-in data deduplication and off-site replication, and we've introduced a back-end capacity pricing model that encourages you to take advantage of TSM's outstanding data reduction and data lifecycle management capabilities to further reduce your overall cost of ownership.
We are seeing many customers consolidate their diverse backup infrastructures onto the TSM platform, and we are also seeing success with Managed Service Providers (MSPs), some through the "Backed Up by IBM TSM" partner program, leveraging TSM to offer enterprise-class data protection services to small and medium size businesses and agencies that could not otherwise afford this level of protection.
To learn more about how Tivoli Storage Manager can improve the performance and efficiency of your IT environment, please contact your local IBM rep or Business Partner. We would love to have you be part of our continuing growth and success.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Fifteen Minutes Can Save You 50% on Your Data Insurance
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I know. I'm sinking pretty low when I borrow a line from an animated gecko. But as I keep thinking that data backup and restore systems are very much like automobile insurance, I just can't resist.
Think about it – what value do you get from paying for auto insurance, other than the peace of mind that should some fool run into you, you'll be able to get back on the road in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable expense? The same is true with data backup: on its own, it offers little value while costing a lot of time and money, but you had better have one when something / anything goes wrong.
As with your auto insurance, you want to pay as little for backup/restore as possible, while meeting your service level objectives. There are choices to be made that impact your costs and your recovery capabilities – does your policy include towing, collision repair, or the use of a rental car while yours in the shop? And what is the out-of-pocket deductible you have to pay per accident?
Same thing with backup – which data do you protect, how often do you perform backup, how many versions and copies do you keep, how long do you keep them, where do you distribute them, how fast do you need to restore? All of these service level considerations can impact your costs.
At IBM, we recognize that on the one hand, your business requires the most advanced, reliable and scalable data protection solutions for your applications and data; and on the other hand, the investments in these solutions are nothing more than insurance – they don't contribute to the top line, and they only contribute to the bottom line when they are called upon to recover operations following a data loss disaster.
We are helping our customers meet these conflicting challenges through an evolution of continuous improvements to our data protection and recovery software, led by Tivoli Storage Manager, that can dramatically improve your business continuity service levels while reducing your costs even more dramatically.
To learn how you may be able cut the costs of your backup environment by 50% or more, please invest 15 minutes reading our new whitepaper, Ten Ways to Save Money with Tivoli Storage Manager.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
FlashCopy Manager, DP/SQL, DP/Exchange EAP/Beta Program Announcement
Delbert Hoobler 1000008PR6 firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  tivoli data-backup data-protection storage storage-management storage-software tivoli-storage-manager tivoli-storage flashcopy-manager 2.251 besøg
Hi There!
IBM is looking for customers and business partners who are interested in participating in an Early Access Program (EAP)/Beta Program for an upcoming release of FlashCopy Manager, Data Protection for SQL, and Data Protection for Exchange. If you would like to nominate your organization to participate in this EAP/Beta, please send an email to:
Mary Anne Filosa (email@example.com)
and be sure to include your organization's name. Once your email is received you will be sent instructions on signing off on the EAP/Beta legal form online and when that signoff has been completed, you will be sent a link to the program's nomination site. We encourage you to respond quickly if you are interested as the program begins in mid December.
NEW! Tivoli Storage Manager v6.3
Richard Vining 2700019R2A email@example.com Emneord:  service-management storage-blog unified-recovery-manageme... restore recovery risk-management data-reduction disaster-recovery archive compliance data-protection business-continuity retention deduplication tivoli backup 2 kommentarer 6.447 besøg
Check out the NEW Tivoli Storage Manager v6.3
You should expect more from your storage, and from your storage vendor. On October 11 and 12, IBM is announcing a broad range of new and enhanced storage products that help to meet this challenge.
Included are significant updates to the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) family. TSM is already the data protection software leader in scalability, functionality, data reduction, performance and reliability. The v6.3 release will keep us ahead of the competition, and will help to keep you ahead of the challenges you're facing.
Struggling with data growth? No problem.
The scalability of TSM is being doubled for the 3rd year in a row, now supporting up to 4 billion data objects in a single TSM Server. In 2008, the internal database limit was 500 million files, so we've made an 8X improvement since then. That means fewer backup servers are needed. And remember that TSM is a single server architecture; we don't add "media servers" to provide scale.
Unified Recovery Management now includes Replication for faster Disaster Recovery
We've been working to simplify the data protection and recovery infrastructure by unifying the management of all the different tools you need for different applications, operating systems, data locations, and data loss causes. In the release of Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition v6.3, we're adding client data and metadata replication to an off-site TSM Server. This provides a "hot standby" disaster recovery capability, managed from within the TSM Admin Center. The replication is asynchronous and can be scheduled on a per client basis to minimize the impact on network bandwidth. And it can be configured in a classic source-to-target model as well as between two active sources, many-to-one, or in a "round robin" architecture.
Simplifying the administrator's life
One of the painful tasks an administrator has to do, especially in large environments, is patching the backup/archive client software on protected systems. With this release, we're adding the ability to automatically push out client software updates across AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Windows systems (Windows push support was actually introduced last year). This new capability should reduce the time needed to perform an update by at least 80%.
Improved integration with VMware
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments v6.3, our non-disruptive off-host solution for VMware virtualized servers, now supports VMware vSphere 5 and includes a plug-in for vCenter to easily manage TSM backup and restore operations from within the VMware environment. Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager v3.1 is also being released with VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection integration and the vCenter plug-in to provide hardware-assisted application-aware snapshot management. Support for DB2, Oracle and SAP databases on HP-UX is also added in the new FlashCopy Manager release.
Something BIG for mainframe customers
Tivoli Storage Manager for z/OS Media v6.3 is a new connector that enables customers to leverage their mainframe-attached FICON storage devices for storing TSM data. This offering won't increase the licensing costs for existing customers that move their TSM v5.x Server software from z/OS and install TSM v6.3 Server on an AIX system or a Linux on z partition, and gives them access to all of the cost-saving improvements made in TSM over the past 3 years.
The new standard in licensing simplicity
In June we announced the availability of the Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery. This bundle of ten TSM and FastBack products is simply licensed by the amount of data being managed within the TSM environment, first copy only. We have seen outstanding results from this new offering, from both new and existing customers. The reason is simple: you want to use the right tool for each data protection job, but you don't want to have to worry about acquiring and managing individual product licenses for each one. This is especially true in virtual server and cloud environments. Added benefit: our broad range of built-in data reduction technologies can dramatically reduce the costs of this offering.
Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery v6.3 is also being announced, and includes all of the TSM and TSM for Virtual Environments enhancements noted above.
What else?
Many other improvements are being introduced across the family, including: better reporting and monitoring; better scalability for Microsoft Windows, Exchange and SQL Server; faster internal processes such as database backup; etc. SAP customers using TSM for Enterprise Resource Planning v6.3 can now do incremental backups on Oracle RMAN.
For more information on the Tivoli Storage Manager enhancements, please refer to the announcement letter on ibm.com (link)
To learn more about all the new IBM Storage announcements, please click here (live 12 Oct.)
Also, please check out the new whitepaper, "Ten ways to save money with Tivoli Storage Manager"
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Improving user experience with a STORServer backup appliance
Richard Vining 2700019R2A email@example.com Emneord:  data-protection risk-management archive deduplication tivoli storserver retention backup service-management business-continuity data-reduction disaster-recovery restore unified-recovery-manageme... compliance recovery storage-blog 4.648 besøg
10 October 2012
In my last blog, I announced that I've moved into a new role, focusing on improving the overall experience for Tivoli Storage software customers and users. One of the areas that is a prime focus for me is the initial experience customers have with our products, and anything that can be done to make them easier to acquire, install, configure and gain fast time to value is of huge interest to me.
One way to achieve these goals is through a fully integrated, easy to use, yet enterprise class appliance. There are many backup appliances on the market, and to make it easier for you to choose the right one for you, analyst firm DCIG (dcig.com) recently published the comprehensive 2012 Backup Appliance Buyer's Guide. This guide can be downloaded for free from http://backupapplianceguide.com/. In it, they analyze, rank and provide details on 66 backup appliance models from 13 vendors. This report includes only appliances that integrate backup software with server and storage hardware, and astutely excludes deduplication and virtual tape appliances that require a separate backup application to drive data to them.
DCIG's plan was to rank the appliances into Basic, Good, Excellent and Recommended categories, based on a proprietary methodology with weighted measurements for a broad range of features and functions. But something interesting happened on the way to the publication of this guide: they found that one appliance, the STORServer EBA 3100, out-ranked the others by such a wide margin that they felt compelled to create a new category just for it: "Enterprise." The STORServer EBA 3100 is the most scalable of STORServer's offerings that are built on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup software, IBM System x servers and IBM System Storage, and they wrap it all in their own simple, intuitive user interface.
Tivoli Storage Manager provides industry leading levels of functionality, scalability, reliability, performance and return on investment. As such, it can require an experienced hand to properly install and configure it to gain the maximum value. STORServer does all of that for you, leveraging many years of best practice experience, pre-installing and configuring the software, and delivering a ready for action solution.
I recently learned of a hospital local to me, Cooley Dickinson in Northampton, Massachusetts that realized the value of the STORServer solution to both centralize their formerly siloed approach to backup, but also to enable disaster recovery and business resilience capabilities.
If you are looking to improve your backup and recovery capabilities, due to problems with the scalability, reliability, functionality, performance or operational costs of your current solution, take a look at STORServer. It may be the quickest and easiest way to fix your backup and disaster recovery capabilities.
To learn why IBM Tivoli Storage software may be the right solution for you, whether you or not you decided to deploy it in an appliance, click here.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Looking forward to a new Tivoli Storage Manager user experience
Richard Vining 2700019R2A firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  archive risk-management retention storage-blog tivoli compliance recovery unified-recovery-manageme... disaster-recovery service-management restore business-continuity backup data-protection deduplication data-reduction 1 kommentar 4.446 besøg
June 4, 2012 was a big day for the IBM Tivoli Storage team, with the announcement of IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center V5.1 at the IBM EDGE 2012 event in Orlando, FL.
Most compelling in this announcement is the continued adoption of the XIV user experience across the IBM storage family. When IBM acquired XIV in 2008, it brought along arguably the coolest user interface in the storage market. It is simple and intuitive, easy to navigate, and yet provides powerful levels of visibility and control of the storage environment.
Here's what the new TPC V5.1 main dashboard looks like:
But what was most exciting for me, as the product marketing manager for the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/productline/) was the "Statement of Direction" that was included in the TPC V5.1 Announcement Letter. In it, IBM states that it intends to adapt this advanced administration GUI for use with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Woo Hoo!!
The plan will be to roll out functionality in the new UI incrementally. If there are any specific things, beyond the obvious basic functions, that you would like to see in the first release, please drop me a note at firstname.lastname@example.com and I will forward it to Product Management.
Disclaimer: IBM's statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM's sole discretion. Information regarding potential future products is intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information mentioned regarding potential future products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. Information about potential future products may not be incorporated into any contract. The development, release, and timing of any future features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Get More From Your Archived Information-Webinar, June 8, 11AM EST
Maria Huntalas 1200007VFS email@example.com Emneord:  information-archive information-retention regulatory-compliance deduplication data-retention archiving data-protection smart-archive 1.241 besøg
Is your archived information earning its keep? Are explosive data growth, regulatory compliance, legal discovery, and data protection on your mind? Drivers like these demand long-term, high-volume data retention. Join IBM and IDC on June 8, 2011 at 11AM EST for an informative webinar on how to "Get more from your archived information."
Laura DuBois, IDC Program Vice President, Storage Software, and Craig Butler, IBM Business Line Executive for Storage Archive, Data Protection & Retention, will address a smarter approach to archiving. Find out how companies like yours use the IBM Smart Archive strategy and lead offerings to help ensure that relevant information is properly retained and protected throughout its life cycle. As part of the Smart Archive strategy, IBM offers IBM Information Archive: a streamlined, flexible archiving solution that helps organizations of practically all sizes address their information retention needs - whether business, legal or regulatory.
Register now for this webinar on June 8, 2011!
Free Online Training for Tivoli User Community Members! May 26, 9:30AM EST
Maria Huntalas 1200007VFS email@example.com Emneord:  recovery business-continuity archive server-virtualization service-management retention tivoli tsm disaster-recovery data-protection backup data-reduction deduplication risk-management storage-blog virtualization restore vadp tsm-virtual-environments 1.819 besøg
Attention all Tivoli User Community Members! There will be free online training offered on May 26, 2011 from 9:30AM - 1:30PM EST on the topic of: Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments.
The following topics will be covered:
-Explain the different types of virtual machine backups (lecture)
-Explain the benefits of Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (lecture)
-Perform full VM-level backups and restores (demo)
-Perform file-level backups and restores (demo)
-Install and configure Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (demo)
-Perform Block-Level Backups with CBT (demo)
Topics were selected from the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6.2 for Virtual Environments workshop and tailored for a one-day online presentation.
New Webcast! Smarter Storage & Data Mgt for Virtual Server Environments
Maria Huntalas 1200007VFS firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  restore disaster-recovery recovery tsm-virtual-environments backup risk-management server-virtualization service-management archive vadp storage-blog deduplication virtualization data-protection business-continuity data-reduction tsm tivoli retention 1.959 besøg
Join us on May 17th at 1: p.m. Eastern / 10:00 a.m. Pacific........to hear all about Smarter Storage & Data Management for Virtual Server Environments
Featured Speakers: Richard Vining, IBM Tivoli Storage Product Marketing Manager & John Connor, IBM Tivoli Storage Product Manager
There is a huge transformation happening in IT organizations! These organizations are migrating from single-purpose physical servers to consolidated virtual machine technologies. The benefits of virtualization are many: cutting acquisition, management and facilities costs by reducing the number of physical machines; increasing service levels through faster server provisioning; and enabling new delivery models such as cloud services. However, virtualizing servers does not reduce the amount of data that is created and stored; actually it can have the opposite effect as virtual machines are moved or de-provisioned. This presentation will describe smarter ways of managing all this data and the infrastructure that stores it, and feature IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center family of products.
New Webcast! Server Virtualization Gets Relief from Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments
Maria Huntalas 1200007VFS email@example.com Emneord:  tsm retention vadp restore data-reduction service-management storage-blog business-continuity tsm-virtual-environments archive recovery data-protection tivoli deduplication server-virtualization risk-management disaster-recovery virtualization backup 1.992 besøg
Join us on May 12th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific.............to hear all about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for Virtual Environments.
Featured Speakers: Greg Van Hise - IBM Storage Architect & Richard Vining - IBM Product Marketing Manager for TSM
There is no question that server virtualization has been a boost to the businesses that have embraced it, but it is also causing huge headaches for storage administrators. Join IBM industry leaders for this live, interactive event, as they introduce the newest addition to the Tivoli Storage Manager family that was built to provide advanced data protection and fast, flexible recovery of your VMware environments. This online-only event allows you to hear from experts as they review TSM for Virtual Environments and demonstrate how it can help you reduce costs while meeting service level requirements. This event will include a 20 minute presentation, followed by a 20 minute live demo of the actual product.
IBM wins CRN Channel Champion Award for Backup and Recovery
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Last week at the 2011 CRN Xchange event in Orlando, the results of the 21st Channel Champions awards were announced. IBM Software was honored with a Gold Award in 2 categories, including Backup and Recovery Software for the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family. The winners will be featured in the April issue of CRN - both in print and online.
Everything Channel's Channel Champion survey helps solution providers select from the myriad vendors out there, the cream of the crop. The Channel Champs program measures the satisfaction of solution providers that currently sell a particular vendor's products and/or services--regardless of whether or not they are formally in a manufacturer's channel program. It is the largest business partner satisfaction study conducted.
Five categories relevant to IBM Software were in the 2011 Channel Champions Survey: Data and Information Management , Middleware, Business Intelligence, Collaboration, and Backup and Recovery software.
The survey results were dominated by IBM and Microsoft.
In 2011 we came out as clear winners by sweeping the Middleware and the Backup and Recovery categories. Most notable is the Backup and Recovery 'win' for Tivoli, where IBM gained a clean sweep victory. It is worth noting that in 2009 Tivoli was a distant third in this category, confirming that a great deal of progress has been made in both product capabilities and channel programs.
IBM placed second in the other 3 categories, losing by a narrow margin to Microsoft in Data and Information Management and by wider margins in Business Intelligence and Collaboration.
Congratulations to the IBM Channels Sales and Marketing Teams for achieving this great honor, and THANK YOU to our fantastic Business Partners for all you do to support our solutions and our mutual customers.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
April 14 Webcast on Smarter Backup for VMware
Richard Vining 2700019R2A firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  service-management storage-blog data-reduction archive vmware retention disaster-recovery backup recovery risk-management unified-recovery-manageme... virtualization tivoli vadp business-continuity restore data-protection tags: compliance deduplication 3 kommentarer 3.165 besøg
The Tivoli Storage Management team is beginning a new series of educational webcasts for the end user community on a range of topics. The first session will focus on data protection and recovery of virtual server environments -- and you're invited!
Server virtualization has been a boon to the businesses that have embraced it, but it is causing huge headaches for storage administrators. One area of particular concern is backup and recovery, especially as the use of virtual servers grows in production environments.
Are all of the Virtual Machines (VMs) covered with appropriate backup policies? Are you able to manage the sprawl of backup agents as the number of VMs increases? Are you having trouble meeting backup windows and recovery SLAs on your VMs?
Join IBM as we introduce you to the newest addition to the TSM family that is built to provide advanced data protection and fast, flexible recovery of your VMware environments. Join us as we review TSM for Virtual Environments and how it can help you reduce costs while meeting service level requirements. We will have a 20 minute presentation and a 20 minute live demo of the product.
Date: April 14, 2011
Time: 2:00 PM Eastern
Speakers: Greg Van Hise, TSM Software Architect; Rich Vining, Product Marketing Manager
Please register for this event using the On-Line Registration.
The Pulse Roadmap to Storage Expertise
Tiffeni Woodhams 270001Q08F email@example.com Emneord:  tivoli information-infrastructur... storage virtualization pulse ibmpulse pulse2010 data-availability data-management tsm backup-recovery dynamic-infrastructure data-recovery ibmstorage ibm data-reduction storage-blog data-protection tivoli-storage 3.075 besøg
With only 4 weeks until Pulse 2010 - The Premier Service Management Event - Optimizing the World's Infrastructure, I thought it might be helpful to provide some details around the sessions and activities that will be available to all of you storage and information infrastructure enthusiasts out there....
Here are a few sessions that you can attend each day. Sign up for these sessions and others today (requires only an IBM.com password - you do NOT have to be a Pulse registered attendee to create a Pulse schedule online)!
(Mon, 22/Feb)
(Tue, 23/Feb)
(Wed, 24/Feb)
Go to the on-line agenda tool to see additional Storage and Information Infrastructure sessions that may be of interest to you. There are also sessions in the Expo Theater Stream.
Register and attend Pulse to take full advantage of all that will be offered:
The importance of choosing the right vendor
Richard Vining 2700019R2A email@example.com Emneord:  deduplication tivoli archive backup data-reduction retention restore service-management risk-management compliance business-continuity unified-recovery-manageme... disaster-recovery storage-blog data-protection recovery 2.602 besøg
As a solution marketing professional, I seem to focus on communicating the key features and benefits of my products. In the case of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), those things include its scalability, functionality, reliability performance and ability to reduce your costs. However, what we don't focus on enough, it seems, is the importance of the vendor itself, and its stability, ability to execute, and commitment to provide exceptional customer support.
I was reminded of this by a stream of e-mails originating in South Africa. A large bank there, who we unfortunately cannot name, has been a TSM customer for more than a dozen years. They were recently acquired by a global banking company based in the United Kingdom. In doing its due diligence, the acquiring bank determined that it needed to evaluate some documents that were created, and deleted in the early 2000s.
The South African bank has been keeping periodic copies of its backup tapes, and copies of the TSM database, for long term retention, and had a reasonable expectation that the required documents were somewhere in their stack of tapes. However, they were not following the best practice of transferring the metadata from the database when they upgraded TSM from version to version over the years.
They needed TSM version 4.2, which IBM ended support for in 2002 (ten years ago!). And they needed a version that ran on AIX. Yikes!
The problem was that they needed to create a new TSM Server, using a very old version of the software in order to restore the old TSM database, which would then point them to where the documents were.
Of course, the easy thing to do would be to tell the customer they were out of luck, but that's not what IBMers do. A worldwide search went out, and one of our long-resident software developers was able to dig out the needed code. The result … the bank was able to retrieve the needed files and completed the acquisition with only a minimal delay.
I came to two conclusions after seeing this story play out. One, you really do need to have a long-term data retention / archive strategy, and follow it. Simply sending backup tapes to a vault is not a viable strategy. You need to worry about how you are to going to restore that data in 10, 20, or more years when all of your IT infrastructure has been refreshed, virtualized, clouded, or whatever comes next. Think about using a content management system rather than your backup software when you need to retain certain information for long periods of time, and plan for periodic migrations of the data to new platforms.
Second, when you fail to follow the advice in 'one' above, wouldn't it be good to have a partner that will go to the ends of the earth to help you out of whatever jam you find yourself in? I know that all vendors aspire to this, and many claim it, but all I can say is that I see it every day at IBM, especially among the Tivoli Storage team. You could do a lot worse. I really enjoy being a part of this team.
I was going to close with a joke about needing to find a player for my stash of 8-track tapes – but that would just be giving away how old I am.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
PULSE Storage Panel - Modernizing Backup
Richard Vining 2700019R2A firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  unified-recovery-manageme... restore retention storage-blog recovery deduplication disaster-recovery backup service-management archive risk-management data-reduction data-protection tivoli business-continuity compliance 3.129 besøg
Are you going to the IBM PULSE conference (ibm.com/pulse)? I am, and I am hosting a panel discussion on the need to modernize backup and restore capabilities.
Scheduled to join me on the panel are:
- Randy Olinger, Director of Enterprise Storage Systems, UnitedHealth Group
- Gerardo Colon, Storage Administrator, Adventist Health System
- Peter M. Nielsen, CEO and Founder, Front-Safe S/A
The premise of the panel discussion will be that backup and restore just aren't as easy as they used to be, given the increasing complexity and distribution of IT, the growth of data to unsustainable levels, the pressure to improve service levels by reducing and eliminating downtime, and the need to cut spending. Our panel of experts will share how their organizations are dealing with these and other challenges, and I'm guessing that we'll cover technology solutions such as data deduplication and compression, snapshots and CDP, replication, simplified and unified administration, archiving and data lifecycle management, and how to do all these things while driving down costs.
But that's part of the fun of a panel discussion -- you never really know what you're going to get. It's scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, March 6th at 5:00PM Las Vegas time, in room 117. The session number is 2136. I hope you can make it
Oh - and have you heard - Maroon 5 and iLuminate will be entertaining us during the event; you have to go!
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager V3.1 Announced!
Delbert Hoobler 1000008PR6 email@example.com Emneord:  recovery recovery-management flashcopy-manager data-protection data-recovery data-backup tivoli-storage tivoli 2.295 besøg
Did you see that we announced a new version of Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager!
Here are the highlights of IBM® Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy® Manager V3.1:
It will be generally available on October 21, 2011.
Check out the full announcement here:
Pulse 2011 - Huge for Tivoli Storage
Richard Vining 2700019R2A firstname.lastname@example.com Emneord:  virtualization risk-management service-management data-protection business-continuity vmware deduplication archive tivoli restore storage-blog retention unified-recovery-manageme... backup recovery vadp data-reduction pulse compliance disaster-recovery 2 kommentarer 2.959 besøg
Pulse 2011 is wrapping up today, and it has been an awesome week for the Tivoli Storage Management team. Our 12 demonstration peds of combined Tivoli and STG storage products in the Solutions Expo have been swamped since the show opened on Sunday evening. An introductory session in the Expo on the new Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments (TSM for VE) had 5 rows of people standing behind the available seating.
The Storage Track kickoff on Monday morning was also jammed, and Rachel Dines of Forrester gave a great speech on how minor changes in your storage environment can have massive, rippling impacts; and provide excellent tips on how to avoid problems through effective storage management practices.
We almost had a massive disaster in our breakout sessions, which were all led by customers and technology partners -- our assigned rooms were way too small for the huge numbers of people that wanted to hear what their peers had to share. Luckily we were able to find bigger space in time of the second session. Kudos to the staff of the MGM Grand for stepping up and rearranging the meeting rooms on no notice and getting it done during a short scheduled break.
All of the breakout sessions were well attended and well received. In successive sessions on Tuesday, three different approaches for protecting VMware systems were presented, with TSM for VE being the highlight. But the really cool moment was when TSM for VE was demonstrated live in front of more than 7000 people in the general session Tuesday morning.
This was my 4th Pulse event, and really the best part of it is meeting so many of the customers, partners and other IBMers that I work with by phone and e-mail all year. Talking face-to-face, sharing a meal or a drink (or two) does so much for strengthening business relationships.I wish we could have everyone attend just for that reason.
One thing that is true of all events in Las Vegas -- they are exhausting. But as I tell everyone, if you aren't tired, you aren't doing it right.
Thank you to everyone that attended and contributed to the success of Pulse 2011. I hope to see everyone at Pulse "V5" next year, the first week of March 2012.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Unified Recovery Management #2
Richard Vining 2700019R2A email@example.com Emneord:  archive data-reduction restore risk-management tivoli service-management deduplication compliance storage-blog unified-recovery-manageme... recovery business-continuity backup data-protection disaster-recovery retention 2.437 besøg
In chapter 1, I described how the planet is becoming 'smarter' and that this transformation is creating enormous amounts of new data that needs to be effectively managed. In this chapter, I'll review some of the things that complicate the effort to ensure all this data is properly retained, protected and available when needed.
Ideally, you would like to have a single tool that does everything, across the entire enterprise, providing the ability to effectively respond following any type of event. While many vendors promise to solve your problems, nobody can provide this capability in a single package – the problem is just way too complex. But (tease), IBM is driving toward a unified recovery management capability that enables you to manage a selection of tools from a single administrative interface. More on this next week; first we need to ensure that we appreciate the complexity.
The first category is infrastructure – where is the data?
Your IT shop probably includes several if not many types of hardware: computer platforms such as x86, Power, RISC, Sparc, mainframes, etc. And there are a wide array of storage platforms, including direct-attached (DAS), network-attached (NAS), tape, and I'm sure many of you still have optical disks somewhere. And from many different vendors!
On these platforms, you're going to have different operating systems: AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, VMware, Windows, z/OS. Then they're going to be physically located in different places – data centers, staff offices, production facilities, remote/branch offices, disaster recovery sites, and warehouses.
Different types of networks, and the available bandwidth on them, further complicates the system. You have local-area (LAN), wide-area (WAN), storage-area (SAN) and metro-area (MAN) networks; additionally you may have cable networks running to some offices (particularly home offices), telecommunications networks that now carry data, and USB connections to some storage devices. And finally, you likely have important data being created and stored on user workstations.
How many tools do you use just to cover this level of complexity? But wait – there's more! The next question is: who owns the data?
We also have to matrix in the different type of applications you have – general file systems; email, instant messaging and collaboration systems; databases such as B2, Oracle, SAP, SWL and mySQL; and your industry-specific mission-critical applications such as CAD/CAM, medical records management, software development, manufacturing resource planning (MRP), or customer relationship management (CRM).
Now consider that the data created and used by any of these applications may be on any hardware platform and operating system, in multiple locations, using a variety of networks. A lot of the data may be on user workstations as well. Oh my!
But there's still more – what can go wrong?
As I noted in my last blog, lots of things can go wrong, any you really need a different response for each of them:
OK, now draw a line from every block on the diagram above to every other block and tell me what your backup and recovery plan is for every line – even in this simple diagram, there are 100 different scenarios, but when you consider all the variables, it may be millions. What tools would you use, who will use them, how long will it take to recover, and how much data will be lost? And what does it cost?
More on that next time!
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Announcing a new way to buy Tivoli Storage Manager
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On May 31 2011, IBM announced the availability of Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery, a bundle of ten Tivoli Storage Manager and Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack products, with an easy to order, deploy and manage capacity-based pricing model.
With this offering, you can deploy any of ten different solution components, in any location and quantity to meet the unique data protection and recovery needs across a wide range of systems, applications and service level requirements. The pricing is based on a tiered Terabyte metric that measures the amount of data managed in Tivoli Storage Manager primary storage pools and FastBack repositories. License costs can be dramatically reduced through the use of built-in source and target data deduplication, and there is no charge for duplicate copies of the data that may be used for disaster recovery, testing, data mining and other purposes.
The individual products included in this comprehensive package are:
Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition : Provides core backup/restore for a wide range of operating systems; broad support for tiers of storage; NDMP, IBM DB2® and Informix® support; source and target deduplication; advanced disaster recovery planning; and much more.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases : Performs online, consistent and centralized backups for Oracle and SQL to avoid downtime; protect vital enterprise data infrastructure and minimize operation costs.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning : Performs online, consistent and centralized backups for SAP environments.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail : Protects data on email servers running Lotus® Domino® or Microsoft® Exchange, with granular restore of Exchange email objects.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments : Automatically discovers and protects VMware virtual machines; offloads backup workloads to a centralized server and enables flexible, near-instant recovery.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Space Management : Moves inactive data to reclaim online disk space for important active data; frees administrators from manual file system pruning tasks; and defers the need to purchase additional disk storage.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Storage Area Networks : Provides high-performance backup/restore by removing data transfer from the LAN.
Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack : Provides efficient block-level incremental backup and near-instant restore for critical Microsoft Windows® and Linux® servers and applications, in the data center and in remote offices.
Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Microsoft Exchange : Provides the ability to recover individual Microsoft Exchange objects such as email, attachments, calendar entries, contacts and tasks.
Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Bare Machine Recovery : Provides operating system volume recovery following a disaster or catastrophic server failure, fully restoring Windows and Linux systems within an hour.
Existing customers of Tivoli Storage Manager are also able to take advantage of this new pricing model, which will eliminate the need to count Processor Value Units and help to gain better visibility and control of future licensing costs. For more information on converting to this model, please contact your IBM Sales Rep or Business Partner.
Later this week, I will post a list of the advanced capabilities that Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery can bring to your IT environment with the overall benefits of reducing data growth, improving operational efficiency and dramatically reducing costs.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Please visit our storage management partners at IBM PULSE 2012
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Are you going to IBM Pulse 2012, the premier Cloud and IT Optimization event of the year? It's at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas from March 3 – 7, and we have an awesome agenda with some first class speakers and entertainment.
But this blog is about our storage management software ecosystem partners that will also be attending and lending their support. If you will be at Pulse, please plan to visit with these companies while enjoying the refreshments offered in the Expo Center:
And of course, I'll be there as well. You can catch me around the storage pedestals in the Expo Center, and at breakout session 2136 (5:00 Tuesday, room 117). I hope to meet many of you there.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Netex HyperIP Accelerates TSM Replication
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In October 2011, IBM added native replication of backup data in Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition v6.3 to help customers add "warm standby" disaster recovery capabilities to their unified recovery management platform. This is a powerful new feature that can help reduce the costs of maintaining a separate DR point solution, and simplifies the overall management of the environment.
However, when moving data between physical locations, especially over the long distances desired for a true disaster recovery solution, network latency can become a significant issue. TSM replication is extremely efficient, in that it sends only incremental, deduplicated data between sites. But transfer times can still be impacted by network latency over long distances.
To overcome this problem and provide near native transmission speeds, WAN acceleration solutions such as Netex HyperIP can be deployed.
Netex recently completed testing of their solution with the new TSM replication feature and found that it can accelerate data transfer by as much as 6 times, or 12 times with HyperIP's block-level compression. To learn more, please visit http://www.netex.com/blog/?p=206
NEW! IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments v6.2
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On February 22, 2011, IBM announced the newest member of the IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager family of unified recovery management solutions.
While Tivoli Storage Manager already provides a very effective solution for the challenge of protecting VMware systems, the new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments offering provides additional improvements for backup efficiencies and advanced recovery capabilities. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments eliminates the burden of running backups on a virtual machine by leveraging VMware's vStorage APIs for Data Protection, which offload backup workloads from the virtual guest machines to a centralized vStorage backup server. The vStorage backup server takes full and incremental snapshots of virtual machines, processes the backups and sends the results to an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager server.
The central vStorage server can itself be installed in a VMware guest, and requires no storage capacity of its own, so this advanced solution can be implemented without the need to additional hardware.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments provides customers with flexible recovery options: restore individual files, disk volumes or entire Virtual Machines from a single-pass backup. Access to full Microsoft® Windows and Linux® disk volumes can be restored in just a few minutes while the data is copied in the background, reducing downtime by hours or days.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments also includes the ability to automatically discover new Virtual Machines as they are brought on-line, and auto-assign backup policies so that all data remains protected.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments integrates with and extends the role of Tivoli Storage Manager in meeting needs for backup and recovery, online database and application protection, disaster recovery, data reduction, bare-machine recovery, space management, and archiving and retrieval. In the virtualized environment, it provides both improved frequency of backups to reduce the amount of data at risk, and faster recovery of data to reduce downtime following a failure.
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments will be demonstrated at the IBM PULSE 2011 event in Las Vegas (ibm.com/pulse) starting Feb. 27th. More product information is available at http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr-ve/. The full announcement can be found at here.
Additional commentary:
Lauren Whitehouse, Sr. Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group: http://www.dataprotectionperspectives.com/2011/02/ibm-tsm-for-virtual-environments-closes-gaps/
StorageNewsletter.com: http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/software/ibm-tsm-virtual-environments-v62
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
IBM - Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Workstations - Software
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New Product Announced Dec. 15, 2009
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Workstations is an automated, continuous data protection and recovery software solution for desktop and laptop computers, with central management for thousands of systems, and integration with other Tivoli Storage Management offerings.
Here is the URL for this bookmark: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr-fastback-workstation/
Day 2 - PULSE 2012 and Tivoli Storage
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ILuminate kicked off the General Session with an innovative, cool to watch performance – and as Scott said, their performance plus coffee makes for a wide awake audience!
Steve Mills took the stage – his expertise and client focus really shine through, but the best part was hearing about how IBM "eats its own cooking". He shared about the IT transformation that IBM has undergone, under Jeannette Horan's direction, to increase productivity and efficiency while reducing costs. Did you know that IBM has to manage over 100 petabytes of production data? How do you think they do that – you're right, Tivoli Storage Solutions!! Steve has such a way with words. I especially loved the sound byte, "Linux runs like a scalded dog on the IBM mainframe."
Next up was Bob Picciano – he brought up an impressive panel of customers from Equifax, Rogers, GE and Erie County. Each had a unique story to tell about working with IBM to optimize their business.
The Storage sessions today continued to support the main themes of unified data protection, storage virtualization, and cloud. There were proof points from Bank of China with their consolidated backup and recovery environment, and Unum who delivered a presentation around Storage Virtualization using San Volume Controller and Tivoli Productivity Center. And speaking of TPC, I hope you made it down to the Solutions Expo to see the new GUI for TPC (@ Ped 44) that is being tested right now with customers. Butterfly Software also had a session, talking about data center consolidation – if you haven't heard what Butterfly can do for you, you owe it to yourself to learn! In fact, all our partners in the Solutions Expo have said what a great show this has been for them so far.
Even though these are long days, it's so good to see everyone, hear from everyone, and learn so much! And tonight, WE DANCE! Maroon 5 takes the stage this evening, and I think everyone is ready for it! Remember we get to sleep in tomorrow, and hear from Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, as Day 3 focuses on Innovation.
Related Links:
More on Riverbed and IBM
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What do you think of when you see the name Riverbed? For those of you not familiar, Riverbed is an IBM partner and the leader in Wide Area Network Optimization. These days, Riverbed offers more than just WAN OP solutions. Riverbed products improve IT infrastructure, speed up application performance, reduce bandwidth utilization, and offer solutions to securely leverage cloud storage. For enterprises looking to implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery, Riverbed delivers optimum performance for globally connected enterprises without compromising the end user experience.
Steelhead® appliances from Riverbed, Virtual Steelhead(TM), and Steelhead Mobile can increase network throughput and application performance by up to 100 times. Riverbed Cascade® provides enterprise-wide network and application visibility and analysis for both enterprise customers and service providers. Riverbed Whitewater® cloud storage gateways revolutionize data protection by leveraging cloud storage. And Stingray Traffic Manager® provides unprecedented scale and flexibility to deliver applications across the widest range of environments. All in all, Riverbed offers end to end solutions to analyze, accelerate and optimize an organization's IT infrastructure without compromising performance for the end user no matter how far away they reside from the data center.
Stop by the Riverbed booth E105 at IBM PULSE 2012 to see the latest in IT performance solutions.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Experience Whitewater Cloud Storage at IBM PULSE 2012
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Riverbed and IBM enjoy a strong partnership which, thanks in part to Riverbed's Whitewater cloud storage gateways, extends to IBM's storage management software ecosystem. Whitewater leverages public cloud storage to reduce backup and administration costs, improve disaster recovery readiness and provide secure off-site storage for critical backup data, providing LAN-like access to public cloud storage in a drop-in appliance.
What does this mean for the Riverbed/IBM partnership? A seamless integration with existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup infrastructure and cloud-storage providers, paving the way to extracting more value from existing storage, application and network investments. Tivoli Storage Manager administrators can leverage Whitewater's local caching and public cloud storage abilities to propel them into the next generation of storage and disaster recovery, leaving classic disk- and tape- based devices (and their operational and maintenance costs) behind. Together, Riverbed and IBM offer a best-of-breed solution which slashes costs and enables almost unlimited scalability, taking full advantage of the flexibility and cost savings offered by storage-cloud services.
Riverbed will be demonstrating how fast it can move TSM data to public cloud storage at IBM Pulse 2012 in Las Vegas, March 4-6. At the show, come by booth E-105 to ask for a Whitewater demonstration and learn more about how Riverbed can optimize and extend your TSM environment as well as accelerate your WAN with the Riverbed Steelhead product family.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Re: Enabling TSM Unified Recovery Management Replication
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In response to: Enabling TSM Unified Recovery Management ReplicationWant to learn more about how HyperIP can help accelerate your data transfer by as much as 12x? Join NetEx and IBM Tivoli Storage Software for a webinar on Jan. 25, 1PM EST to hear all about how pairing Tivoli Storage Manager 6.3 with NetEx HyperIP can help you achieve this! Register here: http://bit.ly/xQFHdm
Re: Pulse 2011 - Huge for Tivoli Storage
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In response to: Pulse 2011 - Huge for Tivoli StorageYes! Yes! Pulse 2011 was a huge success for Tivoli storage! Each time I visited our storage peds in the Expo hall, they were jam packed with customers & Business Partners. What a great way to start the week with our storage track kickoff session packed to standing room only! That seemed to be par for the course all week at all of the storage sessions. So, we're going on the record now to say "first floor, bigger rooms, please!" @Pulse 2012. Because after all, Tivoli storage rocked Pulse 2011! Great momentum that we can capitalize on all year. Nice job, everyone!
Gartner ranks Tivoli Storage Manager a Magic Quadrant Leader
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In January, analyst firm Gartner issued its long-awaited Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup and Recovery. In it, IBM is placed in the Leaders quadrant. This new report diverges some from previous Magic Quadrant and Market Scope reports on backup software market as Gartner recognizes the transformations occurring in this market to address the significant challenges organizations are facing in adequately protecting their data.
In my opinion, Gartner also recognizes this is a crowded, mature market – after all, everyone has a backup solution. In order to succeed, a vendor must provide added value over traditional solutions that address the growing amount of digital information, the importance of that data to the health of the organization, and the increased service level requirements in an always-on economy.
I believe that Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) has again been noted as a market leader precisely because IBM has continued to add substantial value to the product over the past few years, including:
But Gartner dinged IBM on a couple of valid points. First, they pointed out our slow adoption of advanced techniques for protecting data in virtual server environments. We do have an excellent non-disruptive solution for in-guest backup of Windows and Linux VMs in TSM FastBack; and we added some support for VMware VCB and vStorage APIs for Data Protection to TSM, but the market demands more. And we will be delivering an advanced solution in the very near future that should put us in the lead in this important market segment. And you'll be able to see it at PULSE 2011 later this month.
Gartner also noted while IBM customers tend to love TSM and refute the perceptions that it is still difficult to deploy and manage (as had been the case years ago), the rest of the market is basically unaware of the improvements and value that the latest versions of TSM deliver. The problem, if you can call it that, is that IBM has more than 1,000 important products in the market, and trying to advertise them individually would be both impractical and ill-advised.
Instead, IBM directs its marketing muscle to higher order strategies, including "Building a Smarter Planet", Green IT, data center transformation and optimization, integrated service management, security and governance, and of course, cloud computing. It is important to point out that implementing any of these strategic projects, in any size organization, is going to create and rely on a large and growing amount of data. Providing continuous access to this data is a basic requirement for any successful IT service.
In my opinion, only IBM Tivoli provides the data protection and recovery capabilities that can scale and perform to meet these high order challenges, and meet the needs of present and future IT service delivery. To learn more, please visit the Tivoli Storage Management website.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Unified Recovery Management #4 - Technology Choices
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Unified Recovery Management #4 – Technology Choices
In my last entry, I explored some of the considerations that you should include in an overall data protection and recovery strategy, including matching the value of the data being protected to service level expectations such as Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and overall costs.
Today I'll cover some of the many technology choices that are available to help you meet your objectives. As in previous installments in this blog, this adds another layer of complexity to the program – which technology do you use to meet which need? And at the end of the day how many different tools can you really manage effectively to meet the complex challenges of protecting your data?
Tape-based backup is probably still the most widely-used backup method in corporate and government environments. The challenges with tape have been well documented – lots of manual processes that can lead to errors and recovery problems; poor RPO and RTO performance; and the physical movement of tape cartridges that can create data security risks. For these reasons, many organizations have moved to a blend of disk and tape for backup, enabling faster and more frequent backups, and faster restores from disk, while moving backup data to tape in the background for longer-term retention.
Mirroring and replication are good technologies for system-level recovery and fail-over. However they can leave you with a big hole in your recovery strategy – the loss or corruption of individual files - since any loss will be immediately replicated to the backup system, leaving you with 2 bad copies of your data.
Continuous Data Protection, or CDP, takes the benefits of replication and adds in point-in-time recovery options. The problem with CDP is cost – it requires far more storage capacity than other solutions, and can strain network bandwidth as well.
All three of the above technologies are also susceptible to being unable to recover any files that are open at the time of the data loss incident, such as a system crash – although there are utilities available to help mitigate this issue.
Snapshots fix the open file issue by creating application-consistent time-based recovery points. It is necessary to pause or "quiesce" the application for a very short period of time to accomplish a snapshot, but it's far faster than a tape backup because it only takes incremental changes over a much shorter period of time. Snapshots can be run very frequently, often many times per hour, to meet aggressive Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). Hardware-based snapshot technologies are not always 'application-aware', so the consistency (ability to fully recover) of open files can be a problem.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity (DR/BC) services are key focus for many organizations, especially given the growing number of natural and man-made threats to normal operations. Some companies handle it themselves, others contract it out. Either way, you'll need to balance overall costs against benefits, matching the needs of individual applications and locations to the service levels provided.
Data deduplication is a much hyped technology that, depending on where it is applied, can reduce the amount of data that needs to be backed up and sent over the network, or reduce the amount of backup capacity required, or both. Most of the gains claimed by deduplication are in environments that perform weekly full backups that cause an enormous amount of duplication. Check out my blog series on data reduction to learn more about this important topic.
Virtual Tape is a relatively new entrant to the market, combining the best efficiencies of disk and tape, and adding in data deduplication to help meet cost per capacity goals. As a backend repository, a virtual tape library (VTL) does not replace data capture technologies such as backup, replication or archive, but can be an effective complement to them.
I added Reporting to the diagram above, only because you'll want to have visibility into the functionality and performance of your data protection and recovery environment n order to provide the assurance that your strategy is effective and meeting the needs of the business.
In my next blog, I'll start to show how IBM can provide encouraging answers to these questions.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
Unified Recovery Management #3
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Unified Recovery Management #3: Recovery Considerations
Welcome back! In chapter 2, I probably scared you senseless with the incredible complexity that storage and backup administrators face in trying to manage data across a wide array of infrastructure and application types, adapting tools and processes to react to a wide array of things that can go wrong, all to ensure that the impacts on users and business operations are minimized.
In this chapter, I'll attempt to put a little structure around how to cost-effectively address this daunting challenge. It's all about policies that balance the needs of the business against the resources you have – money, people, infrastructure (or more simply, money!).
If you try to take a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to data protection and recovery management, you are either going to spend way too much money (putting the solvency of your organization at risk), or you are not going to meet the needs of the most critical business applications (putting competitiveness and long-term viability at risk).
So the answer is to apply the right technologies and policies to each application need. And yes, this will add another layer of complexity to the environment, but there isn't much choice.
This diagram lists just some of the things you should consider when creating a recovery plan for each type of data, in each location, for each of the things that can reasonably go wrong.
The first one Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). This measures how much data you're willing to risk, in terms of the time between backup operations. If you're backing up a system once each night, you have an RPO of 24 hours, and all of the data created and changed in the 24 hours after the last backup is at risk. That's obviously not good enough for many applications in many industries, but it is good enough for others.
The second consideration is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This measures the amount of time it takes to recover from an event. Depending on the type and location of the event, RTO can include the time to determine what happened, deploy any needed hardware and other infrastructure, copy the needed data from the backup repository, recreate any lost data if possible (see RPO above), and reconnect your users and other systems. The longer the RTO, the longer the applicable systems may be down, so planning for a short RTO for the more critical applications is appropriate.
Next, you'll probably need to consider the costs of the solution in terms of acquisition costs for the solution, plus labor, bandwidth, on-going services, etc. The key to a successful recovery plan is to balance these costs against the needs of the business – ensuring that you are delivering the appropriate levels of RPO and RTO at the lowest possible costs.
The last consideration is probably obvious to everyone, but you're not going to want to deploy any recovery solution that negatively impacts business operations. For example, applying an aggressive RPO (frequent backups) to a critical application isn't going to work if the recovery solution requires that you stop and close the application to perform the backup. The cure is not allowed to kill the patient.
So, what can you do? There are lots of choices and point solutions – from many vendors - to address each of the permutations that your plan may have, and I'll cover many of them in my next blog. Then I'll start looking at ways to tie all those technologies together to create a truly Unified Recovery Management platform.
New whitepaper about TSM Protecting Microsoft SQL Databases Hosted in VMware
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Check out the new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Protecting Microsoft SQL Databases Hosted in VMware whitepaper that describes how to use TSM for Virtual Environments - Data Protection for VMware and TSM for Mail - Data Protection for Microsoft SQL server together to protect your VMware environments hosting VMs with Microsoft SQL Server.
The goals of this paper are to demonstrate how Tivoli Storage Manager can be used to accomplish the following:
Have a great day!
STORServer releases a new version of it's Console for TSM
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I've written about STORServer before. They are an IBM Ready-for-Tivoli Software Certified Business Partner, that offers a range of backup and recovery appliances that leverage IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software. The sweet value add from STORServer, besides putting all the hardware and software together for you, is the nice, simple user interface that they've built in front of TSM.
Earlier this year, STORServer announced that they would offer the STORServer Console (SSC) as standalone software, enabling customers or other integrators to build their own TSM based backup appliances. SSC allows Tivoli Storage Manager users to operate their environment entirely from an easy-to-use interface, while maintaining the latest robust, feature-rich capabilities of TSM. The software gives nearly any administrator or operator the ability to manage and monitor their TSM environment with simplicity.
STORServer is now announcing the availability of STORServer Console v3.0 (SSC), which supports client node replication, providing the ability to incrementally replicate a backup client node's data from one TSM server (source) to a remote TSM server (target) for disaster recovery. In addition, numerous enhancements have been made to SSC v3.0 reports, including:
STORServer is offering a free 45-day demo license at http://storserver.com/STORServerConsole.aspx. You can read the full press release here.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."