IBM has announced it has upgraded its Tivoli Storage Manager product with enhanced scalability, data deduplication tools, and new reporting and monitoring features. Part of IBM's Service Management strategy, Tivoli Service Manager 6 is intended to offer customers the visibility, control and automation required to maintain access to information while making more efficient use of storage resources.
The new release "is designed to deliver significant enhancements around the areas of scalability, availability and performance for our customers," John Connor, IBM product manager for Tivoli Storage Manager, tells 5 Minute Briefing. And in doing so, he notes, a key goal is to help customers reduce their costs, particularly in the current environment, in which "managing costs is more important than ever."
Tivoli Storage Managers integrates with IBM's DB2 database software, which manages up to twice the amount of data objects as previous versions, potentially allowing for management of one billion objects in a single system. According to IBM internal studies, customers can obtain as much as a 300% improvement in backup performance, enabling them to increase workloads that can be managed within existing backup windows. The integrated database software also allows customers to retroactively apply policy changes to protected or archived objects.
Additionally, a new version of Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition provides data deduplication to help customers slow the rate of backup data growth by identifying and eliminating redundant data.
Tivoli Storage Manager 6 offers new reporting and monitoring features. In addition to offering a customizable dashboard, the new release provides a range of predefined reports, as well as the ability to create custom reports using the open source Eclipse-based tool BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool) , notes Connor.
Supporting data management throughout its lifecycle, Tivoli Storage Manager offers enhancements that are designed to reduce costs and improve service levels. Among these are new capabilities in IBM System Storage N series network-attached storage systems (NAS) that can potentially reduce the time it takes to perform incremental file-level backups from hours to just minutes; improved integration with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for remote office data protection; item-level recovery of Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory environments; and full image backups of virtual machines in VMware environments.
In the works for more than a year and tested by more than 200 beta users, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 will be available March 27, 2009. "It is designed not only for customers today, but for growth in the future," says Connor, who notes that the feature set was identified based on customer feedback and the challenges they are facing in terms of the high rate of data growth.
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