IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 Boasts Superior Performance, Security, and New Features

In the category of business resilience solutions, few technologies are as central as data backup/restoration/archiving. A comprehensive strategy designed to ensure maximum data availability must anticipate the possibility of data loss—stemming from many possible root causes ranging from natural disasters to simple hard drive failures—and plan for it in advance. For this reason, enterprises have increasingly turned to backup products with maximum flexibility, scalability and ease of use to help guarantee that critical data can always be retrieved on demand—quickly and reliably, and regardless of the complexity of the host IT infrastructure.

Among enterprise-class backup solutions, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) stands out as a premier option for many reasons. For example, it provides centralized, policy-based management capable of handling virtually any type of data on virtually any form of digital storage, whether random-access storage (such as disk drives) or sequential-access storage (such as optical media and tape drives).

As business needs evolve, however, IT solutions must evolve with them—and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is no exception. As a result, a new version of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, 5.5, which is scheduled to ship in mid-November of this year, will bring with it a host of new features and functionality designed to introduce key improvements in efficiency and performance, functionality, security, and ease of use.

Faster Performance and Effortless Security
In the category of performance, for instance, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 will boast significant gains when dealing with sequential access data pools. Data of this type can only be accessed in a particular order, rather than beginning at any point within it; associated devices, such as optical drives and tape drives, therefore, deliver dramatically lower performance when compared to random access devices such as traditional hard drives. Thus, a backup solution capable of optimizing sequential device transaction performance is clearly better than one that isn’t.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 delivers in this category by allowing multiple concurrent read operations for a given sequential access device. This means that while any one read access will still be sequential—and limited to the speed of the device—it can happen in parallel with another read access on that same device without creating performance blocks. Another optimization along these lines pertains to the way IBM Tivoli Storage Manager handles migration. At the present time, it takes place based on the number of sequential access file volumes that have data; IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 will accelerate migration by shifting that criteria to the data occupancy of those volumes instead. The total transaction time for backup operations that involve sequential access devices, therefore, should fall considerably, translating directly into improved efficiency of the overall backup strategy.

And the value proposition of the new version only begins there. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 also delivers significant improvements in the category of security via a new key management scheme. While encryption is certainly supported in the current IBM Tivoli Storage Manager client, key management isn't. The upshot for users is that they are required to manage security at this level themselves, typically by storing a client-side key (password) and entering that key whenever a retrieval process is required. This inconvenience is directly addressed in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5, in which the server will store and manage keys centrally, generating them on demand and retaining them in its own database. Furthermore, this new key management will also apply to supported tape drives, so that they can encrypt/decrypt data as it is written to, or read from, their storage. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager thus delivers a considerable simplification of security in both contexts, yet the overall security to the enterprise is increased.

Get IPv6 Support, Enhanced Interoperability, and Improved Fault Tolerance with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5
A third enhancement comes in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5's support for Internet Protocol version 6. While most of today's networks use version 4, IP v6 is expected to replace it in the near future for a number of reasons, among the most prominent of which is IPv6's dramatically increased address space. This is essential to ensure that as the total number of Internet-capable devices continues to scale up rapidly, each will continue to have a unique IP address without the need for alternate approaches such as network address translation (NAT). IBM Tivoli Storage Manager's support for IPv6 means that it will now be fully interoperable with any IPv6-based network going forward (and any IPv6-based devices on them).

Another form of improved interoperability in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 concerns its support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). VSS is already supported for Microsoft Exchange mail servers; IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 will now support VSS in the case of servers running Microsoft SQL databases, to minimize the backup window normally associated with exceptionally large databases without requiring any shutdown of those servers.

Superior fault tolerance will also be a part of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5. Imagine that an unsupervised import/export routine is halted due to an unforeseeable technical complication—not an unknown phenomenon in the world of data backup. With IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5, such processes can be resumed at the point they stopped, instead of restarting them from scratch. Such an enhancement of user convenience and ease of use is characteristic of the new features coming in this version of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

In fact, new features will be arriving for multiple members of the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family. For enterprises which use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Copy Services (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for CS) to back up Microsoft Exchange servers, good news will come in this version: version 5.5 should now support Microsoft Exchange 2007. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for ACS) 5.5 will provide new support for snapshots of IBM's DB2 relational database management system when running under AIX (IBM's flavor of UNIX) and Linux (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Finally, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for ACS 5.5 should also integrate elegantly with IBM N series Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, delivering full backup and restore functionality with minimal impact on the device performance (and the associated business impact).