IBM Delivers Unified, Enhanced Data Recovery Management

Protect your data and you protect your enterprise

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Data is a mission-critical resource; it stands to reason that the better organizations can protect it, everywhere it occurs in the infrastructure and at every stage in its lifecycle, the better the business outcome they will get.

As infrastructures have become more complex, though, data backup and recovery has become more complex in proportion. Today, data is distributed in more ways, on more endpoints, than ever before… and there is far more data as well.

IT has often responded to this situation by deploying multiple backup solutions to address different conditions—for instance, remote sites (with less data, of lower business priority) may have a different backup solution than primary sites (with more data, of higher business priority). This fragmented approach to data backup management, however, can actually increase the risk that data will be lost. Because overall management is more complex, takes more time, requires more manual attention, and incurs higher costs, the business outcome is not improved; it's diminished.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6.2 delivers unified recovery management and a host of new features.

IBM offers a superior approach: unified recovery management. The idea behind it is both simple and compelling: if you have centralized management of all backup processes under a single pane of glass, data backup becomes simpler, less expensive and more powerful. The odds that core data will be lost are lower, and it's much easier to retrieve data whenever and wherever it is needed.

Toward that end, IBM recently announced IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6.2 (TSM). This family of data backup solutions has delivered best-in-class performance for more than 16 years, thanks to powerful policy-driven features, intelligent automation and the ability to work with virtually any form of data repository, from laptops to computational clusters to enterprise mainframes.

Now, in its latest version, TSM has been enriched with many powerful new features that not only increase performance and add much-needed new functionality, but also position TSM as an excellent platform of unified recovery management—the central tool organizations need to protect data in an optimal fashion at all stages of its lifecycle, everywhere it may exist.

Source-side data deduplication

“Now, in its latest version, TSM has been enriched with many powerful new features that not only increase performance and add much-needed new functionality, but also position TSM as an excellent platform of unified recovery management—the central tool organizations need to protect data in an optimal fashion at all stages of its lifecycle, everywhere it may exist.” One of the best ways to improve data backup as a holistic process is to minimize the amount of data being backed up… without actually losing a single byte.

How is this possible? Deduplication is the answer. When storage tools can intelligently assess infrastructural data, comparing it chunk-by-chunk against data that has already been backed up, and find a perfect match, they can simply skip those duplicate chunks. Instead, they can create a tiny pointer to reflect the fact that that chunk will be needed in any given recovery process. This approach means the total size of the backup becomes smaller in proportion to the amount of duplicate data, significantly reducing storage and archiving costs. Yet zero data is lost.

Now, in version 6.2, TSM can deduplicate more intelligently than ever before. TSM is now capable of assessing data as it exists on the client side, not just the server side.

This means that duplicate chunks aren't even sent over the network to the backup server in the first place, leaving the network bandwidth that would otherwise have been used free for other business purposes. Even better, the backup process is substantially accelerated as a result—a major consideration for organizations that may already be pushing the limits of the backup time window.

Unified recovery management with TSM FastBack

As suggested earlier, the simpler and more centralized overall backup/recovery management is, the better the business outcome will tend to be.

TSM 6.2 serves as an excellent proof point of this idea because it now allows administrators to manage TSM FastBack servers and TSM FastBack for Workstations using the standard TSM interface.

Why is this important? FastBack has become a leading solution for organizations that need tools optimized for Windows or Linux client data—for instance, in the case of a remote site that uses Windows systems. And now, thanks to the unified recovery management linking TSM and TSM FastBack, backing up such sites (or subsets of the total infrastructure) is easier and faster than ever.

Shared policies can be created to determine exactly what to back up, when to do it and how long to keep it, whether it's TSM or FastBack that will carry them out. And these policies can be controlled and modified from a centralized location, using one interface. In this way, the strengths of each solution can be leveraged for best business results—for instance, FastBack for short-term operational recovery, and TSM for long-term data retention—and yet the overall management complexity falls.

Enhanced support for virtual environments

Virtualization has transformed many enterprise-class IT infrastructures by allowing them to run multiple servers on a single physical host. Yet this same revolution has created new headaches for backup tools, which in some cases don't deliver the full range of functions for virtualized environments.

Fortunately, TSM 6.2 does. TSM now includes enhanced support for two of the leading virtualized environments in use today: VMware, through the vStorage API for Data Protection and Microsoft Hyper-V, through VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) snapshots.

In the case of VMware, TSM 6.2 can auto-discover new VM guests, ensuring that new servers dynamically created in the virtualized environment won't be skipped during the backup process and sparing storage administrators the need to modify backup policies manually. Backups can occur either in-guest (guests are treated as if they were physical servers) or off-guest (guests are backed up as a complete system image for disaster recovery purposes). It is also possible to back up guests from a Windows proxy server at either a file level or full-VM level, which reduces the overall impact on the infrastructure of a backup or recovery process.

Microsoft Hyper-V backups can similarly generate either a full snapshot (image) of the guest machine, or create snapshots synchronized with the applications/file systems inside guests.

Automatic deployment of Windows client upgrades

Another way TSM has been enhanced lies in the way it handles client agents. In the past, agent management was manual; this meant an administrator was responsible for deciding when new agents should be installed, and ensuring that all the appropriate agents were updated throughout the infrastructure. This was a time-consuming and operationally expensive task and it also implied the possibility of inadvertent errors (such as simply forgetting to install the new agent on certain end points).

With TSM 6.2, Windows agent upgrades can be automated. Administrators can create policies that will deploy agent upgrades on a predetermined schedule—not only accelerating the overall update process, but ensuring that agents are updated in a complete and timely manner.

Improved automation and performance of back-end data management processes

It stands to reason that the more the TSM server can do simultaneously, the better backup/recovery will be; process duration and costs will both fall.

Accordingly, IBM has optimized TSM server performance so that the server can now perform certain tasks in parallel; these include data migration, copy pool backup and copy active data. The result: greater TSM Server utilization, generally enabling faster and more frequent backups, and superior overall ROI.

Learn more

Pulse 2010 Virtual Experience

Attend sessions, breakouts and demos and find Pulse assets full of hints and tips, user experiences and key technical content that you can't get anywhere else.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Leverage next-generation data storage and unified recovery management capabilities

Featured community

Leverage and contribute to the collective wisdom around Tivoli

Engage the community