Soup-to-nuts data protection system

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IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager has been around for almost a decade and a half, and is the single backup and recovery solution at many enterprise data centers. Since it first went out to customers in 1993 it has gradually mixed together under a single wrapper, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, HSM, database and application protection, bare metal recovery, and now continuous data protection. It is the closest thing to a soup-to-nuts data protection system on the market today.

By “soup-to-nuts” I don’t just mean it provides a variety of data protection applications: it also works with a wide span of platforms that includes almost everything from Windows servers to the largest mainframes, plus quite a few things in between.

This week, 20,000 sites later, IBM refreshes this flagship product with the release of TSM 5.4. Here are the highlights of what you can expect to see.

First, they have improved integration with their “N series” NAS devices (IBM rebrands Network Appliance offerings for this product line). Managing NAS and SANs together in an integrated environment is a rarity, but TSM now understands NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol), the method by which NAS devices speak with their backup applications.

Several things result from this. First, TSM is now able to back up NAS data as both disk volumes and tape. TSM users with NAS devices will now have access to offsite vaulting for their NAS backups, providing filer data with the same level of disaster recovery offsite protection as other types of devices receive.

TSM adds three new security features: it now supports encryption on IBM’s TS1120 tape drive; it generates, encrypts, and stores the encryption key in its database along with other tape volume metadata; and it can shred data if the data has been deleted from a data pool flagged as requiring shredding. Most managers still don’t encrypt tapes, probably for two main reasons. First, encryption adds time to the tape writing process. Second, key management issues remain a real concern for IT managers. TSM’s key management feature should help with the second of these issues. The shredding feature will be useful for certain compliance-related activities.

New replication features include added device support for Copy Services and for Advanced Copy Services and Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) ‘instant restore’ support for Microsoft Exchange.

Other TSM 5.4 enhancements are aimed specifically at smaller devices, and include support for Microsoft SharePoint, support for Windows Vista and Macintosh Intel, and HSM for Windows. There is also an upgrade path from TSM Express to TSM.

IBM is shifting the pricing model for TSM to align it with the models for the rest of its product line. The company says this will have little effect on customer pricing, however.