System Backup Without a Backup Window

Global operations and strict governmental requirements for extensive records retention have shattered the common notion of a backup window for IT. Few sites are now in a position to shutdown all data processing and backup their data and applications. They certainly cannot do so with complete confidence that 100% of the data is up to date. As more edge applications run 24X7 and competitive pressures drive mechanisms to sense-and-respond to market changes, the ability to shutdown mission-critical applications dwindles.

Today, IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager (TSM) protects data integrity for more than two million systems worldwide. What’s more, as large data centers have been at the forefront of this change for some time, it’s worth noting that more than 80 of the Fortune 100 companies use TSM for automated data protection today.

While the external drivers for better protection of data are more than enough to worry IT management over the handling of backups and planning for the inevitable disaster recovery scenario, they are not the only things reshaping demands on backup. Across all sizes of IT sites, CIO are looking at resource virtualization as a way to improve IT operations efficiencies.

Resource virtualization places new demands on backup and disaster recovery planning, while creating new opportunities that can be exploited by sophisticated backup and recovery operations. With all of that, there is also the spotlight of service management on IT and the need to evaluate best practices from such sources as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology), which is central to IBM Service Management.

Plan for Success
As a result, a good backup package for today is not good enough. Backup and recovery are not simply part of a scheduled operation: Backup and recovery must be part of a planned operation. After all, a cornerstone to the argument for instituting a service management approach for IT is that 85% of IT problems are created by changes introduced by IT. If "business continuity" is to have meaning, backup and recovery planning and the software used to carry out the process must embrace every contingency, including changes to the IT environment itself.

Along those lines, the new release of TSM version 5.4 is focused around critical areas for IT. What’s more, these are also the four key areas that are centers for IT change:

• Optimized operation in a disk-to-disk environment,
• Enhanced security,
• Enhanced data replication technology support, and
• Administrator productivity

As a result, the first stage in backup starts at the disk-to-disk level, which makes optimizing for this environment all the more important. A new feature in TSM 5.4 addresses this through the creation of an active-data storage pool. The idea is simple: If anything happens, it is far more likely that it will involve the restoration of data from a recent backup. As a result, collocating recent (active) data in either a common disk or a tape pool within the TSM storage hierarchy will speed access time and cut restore time. Additionally, TSM has improved its integration with network attached storage, such as IBM’s N series devices. The improvements in TSM 5.4 enable NAS backups to take advantage of the benefits TSM offers, such as off-site vaulting and inclusion in TSM generated disaster recovery plans.

Content Matters
As important as a quick restoration of lost or corrupted data is, equally important is the act of classifying backup data with the business process characteristic of activity. In a service management environment, the goal is to replace policies based on backup processes with policies based on the content of data files. So too, the creation and management of storage pools based on data content rather than device specifications is a key tenet of storage virtualization. This seemingly small change in TSM 5.4 has long-term implications of growing importance.

A similar business-driven classification for storage is created for data that needs to be kept in a highly secure manner. The new disk pool classification is dubbed "shreddable." When data is deleted or moved from this pool, TSM writes random data patterns over the physical storage blocks.

Additional security is also introduced for the IBM® System Storage™ TS1120 Tape Drive. The TS1120 supports data encryption on the drive. Simply restoring backup data is often no longer sufficient as new legislative mandates on data integrity make it necessary to demonstrate that restored data is accurate. In particular, regulations call for compliant electronic storage media to support integrity protection, accessibility, and duplication restrictions, along with an audit trail. TSM 5.4 manages a 256-bit electronic key for TS1120 with each cartridge as a mechanism to protect the data in the event that the cartridge is lost or stolen

Another area where storage virtualization and enhancements to TSM intersect comes in the support of replication technology. Replication support in TSM Copy Services and Advanced Copy Services is critical to support backup and recovery for a host of applications, from Microsoft® Exchange Server to mySAP, coming under regulatory scrutiny and needing to be kept constantly online. Storage virtualization will lower the cost and simplify the management of replication and TSM will maximally leverage the environment.

TSM, virtualization, and service management also intersect in a concentrated effort to improve the productivity of system administrators by lowering the overhead burdens placed upon them. In the new release of TSM 5.4 there are a number of key enhancements to backup set processing geared to boosting administrator productivity. Included among these are the ability to define and create a backup set over multiple nodes, the ability to restore a backup set on a file-by-file basis, the ability to generate backup sets to a point in time, and the ability to place image data on a backup set. That later capability has interesting implications for future OS virtualization support, which is highly focused on maintaining a pool of system and workload images.

All of these new features in TSM 5.4 speak to the immediate improvement of operational efficiencies today. More importantly, they also parallel key IT initiatives seeking to improve resource utilization, simplify infrastructure management, and work within an automated process environment driven by business priorities.