IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is a suite of products that delivers a broad range of storage management capabilities. These capabilities include backup, archive, space management, database and application protection, ERP, bare machine recovery and disaster recovery planning.

TSM for Enterprise Backup and Recovery

With Tivoli Storage Manager your corporate data is protected against unfortunate occurrences resulting in data loss. Tivoli Storage Manager provides automated, centralised and policy based backup of virtually all operating systems and applications. The flexibility of TSM allows the Portal Partnership to tailor a backup and recovery solution to your company’s specific needs (Portal Partnership Storage Solutions). These include; how long you retain your data, where you data is stored, backup and restore performance characteristics, when client schedules are executed, type of backup. The list is as extensive as your company’s unique requirements and TSM is designed to cater for your needs.

Previously backup of company data may have been done on a piecemeal basis – individual file servers or applications required the use of locally attached tape devices for data backup. With TSM a great deal of the manual intervention required to initiate the processes to secure your company data is removed, allowing your IT department to focus on more pertinent tasks. Reliable automation of client actions are par for the course with TSM. Once the definition of the schedules is complete the associated clients will send their data via the LAN or SAN to the storage available to the TSM server, on the day you specify at that time. The inherent flexibility of TSM means the calendar based schedules can be tailored to your needs be it; a daily schedule to initiate an incremental backup of a file server and its operating system or a schedule to be run on the last Friday of the month to take a complete backup of a key database or application.  

In many cases your business critical applications may have required downtime during backup processing to obtain consistency. With the use of Tivoli Storage Manager,  applications and databases have the ability to remain “HOT” while the data backup is processed and the use of Cyclic Redundancy Checking ensures the integrity of your data from client to server. Advanced disk subsystems such as the IBM DS range can be integrated with TSM to facilitate the backup of SAN based LUNS using the disk subsystems native snapshot features. With TSM your company can continue operating round the clock without the interruption of data backups.

With such a large array of supported hardware there is no longer a requirement to manually load a tape each time a backup is initiated, TSM can utilise disk and automated tape based storage. Different performance characteristics are associated with different hardware and the Portal Partnership can tailor your TSM solution to provide the best backup and restore performance to fit within your objectives. TSM is the only Storage Management solution that can migrate data from one storage pools to another due to its relational database tracking data. This allows your business to retain current and active data on faster more expensive disk (where numerous small file data restores gain significant performance) for a defined period before being migrated onto tape for longer term storage. Large sequential data such as database can be directed straight to tape where they benefit from the streaming performance benefits of tape technologies such as Linear Tape Open (LTO).

Tivoli Storage Manager for Archive and Compliance

It is a well known fact that a percentage of data held on your company’s servers will no longer be being accessed on a regular basis. Another way to look at it is that you are paying money to power and cool disks containing data that is no longer in use. Many companies see this as a cost they would like to reduce as power and cooling costs increase. With Tivoli Storage Manager the ability to archive data either for long term retention or for compliance is available straight out of the box allowing you to reduce disk utilisation and improve backup and restore processing.  

Tivoli Storage Manager for System Storage Archive is a compliant version of TSM specifically designed for compliant archival solutions. Once implemented the retention settings cannot be amended and the use of Write Once Read Many (WORM) media means that your archived data is 100% compliant.

Applications to automatically manage the archive and retrieve procedure are numerous. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager provides a Hierarchal Storage Manager Client to remove file data where the last accessed date exceeds a specific period, whilst allowing users to access the archived data by the use of stub files. IBM offers a suite of content management applications to archive emails, email attachments and databases. The Portal Partnership is unique in their capacity to offer highly experienced Content Management and Storage consultants with the skills to offer a complete Content Management solution. PP Content Manager Solutions

Tivoli Storage Manager for Disaster Recovery

In the event of a disaster you want a storage solution capable of recovering your corporate server infrastructure as quickly as possible. Tivoli Storage Manager features a Disaster Recovery Module to facilitate the recovery in the event of a disaster. The use of copy storage pools allowing for offsite media means that in the event of primary site disaster the data can be recreated at a secondary location. The automated daily creation of disaster recovery plans is a beneficial tool in the event of a disaster providing you with key information to recover your site.

The use of bare machine recovery tools such as Christie Bare Metal Restore and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Sysback allows your key server infrastructure operating systems to be restored faster than rebuilding alone in the event of a disaster these are vital in achieving your recovery objectives.

Regular Disaster Recovery testing is the key to recovery. Portal Partnership has assisted in numerous DR tests with our customers.

 Portal Partnership is able to:

·         Design and implement scalable, flexible, best practice Tivoli Storage Manager solutions tailored around your company requirements.

·         Provide maintenance and support for existing Tivoli Storage Manager environments.

·         Provide Health Checks services to ensure that your company storage objectives continue to be achieved.

·         Develop integrated cross brand IT solutions featuring a rich portfolio of IBM \ Tivoli products to provide real business benefits.

For more information regarding IBM Tivoli Storage Manager solutions:

suhail.aslam@portalpartnership.com