Tag Archives: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

11.18.14
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Backup Considerations Grow Within the SMB as the Internet of Things Grows

The IT staffs of medium-sized companies will be seeing more requests to integrate the IoT (Internet of Things) with their missions critical applications.

As stated in the article Internet Of Things: Software platforms will become the rage in 2015, “The growing scope and importance of the data from IoT will force CIOs to integrate the Internet of Things into their Business Technology agenda, with full capabilities for data management, analytics, security, and enterprise application integration.”

Internet of ThingsSo, what is the Internet of Things? First, let’s understand that there is a growing trend in the use of sensors in cars, traffic lights, water meters, and much more. When these devices connect to the Internet to transfer their data to monitoring applications, business applications, or to other devices, this environment becomes the Internet of Things. Other data contributing to the environment is the data from Social Media activity and other applications not in the category of typical core business applications.

It is important to understand that it is the data being transferred over the Internet that makes the Internet of Things (IoT). If these devices or applications remained in communication with only their own platform, they would not be part of IoT.

The trend is that there is a need for the data from these devices and applications to be made available to business applications for increased corporate value. Businesses are integrating these specialized devices and applications with core business processes for analytics and advanced business processing. This data has now become corporate data.

The result is more complex data types within the corporate business data environment. Central backup procedures must be reviewed by IT for proper governance and assurance of data resiliency. This data is now mission critical and must be treated as legacy business data, such as Accounting, Payroll, etc. This provides an additional burden on the IT staff in understanding the implications of developing backup procedures for these diverse data types.

For assistance in reviewing your backup procedure, you can contact Salvus Data, a data backup and recovery MSP specializing in Tivoli Storage Manager.

10.01.14
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Tivoli Storage Manager V7.1 Supports VMware Full Virtual Machine Instant Access and Recovery

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is an enterprise class backup and archiving application. These types of products protect against data loss and enable the ability to recover data for adherence to industry compliance standards and court orders.

TSM is continuing to improve in its capabilities. As stated in the IBM announcement letter for TSM V7.1:  “With the new release of TSM V7.1,  A single Tivoli Storage Manager server improves scalability with up to ten timesenterpise data improvement for daily ingest of deduplicated and replicated data over previously published rates, and new reference architectures optimized for data deduplication.”

That announcement letter goes on to say Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments V7.1 helps to improve backup and recovery management for VMware environments with the following new features:

  • VMware full virtual machine instant access and recovery for improved recovery time objectives, including restore verification.
  • Item level recovery for Microsoft Exchange Server from a virtual machine backup, database-level recovery for Microsoft SQL Server from a virtual machine backup, and recovery of VMware virtual machines domain controllers hosting Active Directory.
  • Data protection for VMware vCloud Director Tenant vApps.
  • Additional status and application coverage reporting of VMware environments in the VMware management GUI.
  • Simplified installation and configuration consolidates various components into one package and optionally enables configuration of the data mover.

Tivoli Storage Manager can be configured to meet an organization’s specific requirements. For those organizations that have IT staff dedicated to mission-critical enterprise applications and are not heavily trained in the complex discipline of enterprise data backup and recovery, the administration of TSM can be remotely managed by data backup and recovery consultants. Salvus Data Consultants is one of the leading TSM integrators offering a range of backup solutions and services to store & protect your valuable information.

Salvus Data Consultants manages their customer’s TSM environment remotely while the customer maintains total control of their data. For more information about the new release of TSM and its capabilities, contact Salvus Data.

Note: All copyright and registered trademarks mentioned in this post are owned by their respective organizations, such as, but not limited to, IBM and VMware.

09.22.14
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Black Swan Events are Considerations for Data Back Up Strategies

Data Backup and Recovery is critical to protecting against the Black Swan Effect.

The “Theory of Black Swan Events” is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that the event is a major issue and a surprise. Understanding the cause of the catastrophic event is

Black Swan Event

Black Swan Event

generally only possible through hindsight. While it doesn’t happen everyday, it does happen. And when it does – you better be ready!

A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes:

  • First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
  • Second, it carries an extreme impact.
  • Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

An example would be Data Corruption existing in a server backup. Yes, there are constant occurrences of data corruption coming in daily from server backups where the data is virtually impossible to restore. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is an advanced utility that can be set up to remedy these common situations on the fly. However, this is only possible if TSM is configured correctly. Your Data backup and Recovery processes should be developed by professionals that understand the nuances of this complex discipline.

Let professionals take over from here, while you concentrate on your core business. You don’t need a Black Swan in your data center. Fort more information on Black Swan Events, contact Salvus Data Consultants.