Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Data Management
  •   Backup and Restore Data

Details

IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager is specifically designed to manage the Backup and Restore operations for a wide range of business environments from the small to the very large. Heterogeneous and multi-vendor systems and storage resources can present challenges to backup and restore operations but Tivoli Storage Manager is designed to handle it. Tivoli Storage Manager scales to protect thousands of computers running a dozen operating systems ranging from laptops to mainframes and that are connected together through the Internet, WANs, LANs, or SANs. Tivoli Storage Manager centralized Web-based management, smart data movement, and storage techniques leverage comprehensive policy-based automation to minimize data protection administration costs and the impact to both computers and networks. Figure 1 shows the scope of Tivoli Storage Manager as a Backup and Restore solution.

Figure 1. Tivoli Storage Manager Environment

Tivoli Storage Manager employs a virtualized model of the physical disk and tape resources that it uses in the process of protecting data. A Tivoli Storage Manager storage pool represents a set of volumes of a similar type of media, for example, disk volumes and LTO tape volumes. Tivoli Storage Manager arranges storage pools into a hierarchy and manages the placement and movement of data within the hierarchy. Tivoli Storage Manager policy can be used to specify the destination pool for a given type of data and in fact can control access down to the individual file level. Tivoli Storage Manager supports backing up to like storage and from one storage medium to another. For example, data that is located on disk and on the network can be sent directly to a Tivoli Storage Manager disk storage pool where it would be considered on like storage or directly to tape where the storage medium has changed or where it can be sent first to disk and Tivoli Storage Manager can use policy to decide if, when, and where to migrate it to other storage pools including off-site storage pools.

Tivoli Storage Manager can be used to satisfy availability or disaster recovery requirements. In terms of availability, Tivoli Storage Manager has the capability of backing up one storage pool to one or more other storage pools, which allows for both on-site and off-site copies of the data. If anything were to go wrong with data in the original backup, Tivoli Storage Manager can automatically fail over to obtain it from another copy of the data thereby ensuring that data is available for recovery when needed.

Tivoli Storage Manager also includes several core functions related to Backup and Restore.

Tivoli Storage Manager core functions:

• Data backup and restore
  • Backups are copies of active online data that is stored on offline storage. Should an online storage device fail if a data error occurs or if someone accidentally deletes a file, the offline copy of that data can be copied (restored) to online storage.
  • Tivoli Storage Manager uses multiple techniques to make data backups and restores as fast, flexible, and low-impact as possible.
• Data archive and retrieve
  • Data archives are copies of active or inactive data from online storage copied to offline storage. Archives are used to keep point-in-time copies of important data for regulatory or bookkeeping requirements and to move inactive data from expensive online storage to less-expensive offline storage. Data archives implemented by Tivoli Storage Manager are managed for a defined lifetime through the policy-automation engine, just like backed-up data. The Storage Manager client can help quickly and easily retrieve the archived data, helping to effectively extend data storage capabilities without the need for more expensive online storage.
• Protection of business-critical applications
• • When thinking of backup and restore, many people immediately think of file system data. However, there are many applications that require online backup capabilities to ensure that a backup is consistent and can be restored correctly.
  • The Tivoli Storage Manager client and server architecture facilitates this by providing a variety of clients. The Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive client provides protection for file system data and the Tivoli Storage Manager data protection clients (listed in the product components section) interface directly with applications such as database and mail applications to ensure that mission critical data is fully protected. Tivoli Storage Manager also provides a Tivoli Storage Manager client application programming interface (API) that allows Tivoli and ISVs to produce new data protection clients as needed. Tivoli Storage Manager data management is very flexible because fundamentally Tivoli Storage Manager manages generic data objects without imposing limitations on the type of data. This capability means that there is great opportunity to produce custom Tivoli Storage Manager clients to support virtually any type of application or data.
• Tivoli Storage Manager includes a number of components that are used to handle a wide range of environments.

Product Components

Tivoli Storage Manager is based upon a client and server architecture. The Tivoli Storage Manager server is responsible for managing the location and movement of data. Various types of Tivoli Storage Manager clients are responsible for accessing data at the source so that it can be backed up and restored or archived and retrieved.

Here is the current set of Tivoli Storage Manager components. For more information on these components see the references listed below.

• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Storage Area Networks
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Application Servers
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Hardware
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Space Management
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for System Backup And Recovery (SYSBACK)
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Application Programming Interface (API)
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Data Retention

Tivoli Storage Manager is a mature and expanding product and a lot of information has been written about how it can be used to support all kinds of business environments. There are a number of manuals and IBM Redbooks (see references below) dedicated to using Tivoli Storage Manager to support the planning, establishing, testing, and implementing the backup and recovery procedures that are required to restore data, as part of overall service restoration and Incident Management.

For more information, refer to:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/index.jsp?toc=/com.ibm.itstorage.doc/toc.xml

For information on managing the data lifecycle, you can search for:

• Policy Configuration Scenarios
• Managing Storage Pools and Volumes
• Using Disaster Recovery Manager

For an excellent detailed overview of Tivoli Storage Manager, see: "Beyond backup toward storage management" at http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/422/kaczmarski.html.

Also refer to Chapter 1,Introducing Tivoli Storage Manager of the Tivoli Storage Manager Quick Start manual. This chapter includes a detailed section on Tivoli Storage Manager Architecture and on how Tivoli Storage Manager works. The Quick Start manual can be located here: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Windows

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