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IBM adds dedupe to Tivoli Storage Manager
2009-02-07
IBM has announced a major release of its Tivoli Storage manager backup, archive and compliance product, adding scalability to up to a billion data objects, up to 3X faster backup speeds, and de-duplication.TSM 6.0 has an integrated DB2 engine that doubles the number of storable data objects with the potential to manage a billion objects in a single system and speed backups by up to 300 per cent. It claims one customer found some jobs that would have taken three or four hours can now be done in 30 minutes. TSM 6 Extended Edition offers what IBM calls data reduction technologies - de-duplication to you and me - understood to be based on Diligent technology. IBM acquired (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/18/ibm_buys_diligent/) Dilligent in April last year for a rumoured $200m. Strangely IBM, keen to quantitatively impress us with DB2 engine integration benefits, provides no guidance for raw to de-duplicated data ratios at all - no cited customer experiences here. It's almost as if IBM wants to downplay its data reduction capabilities. TSM EE also offers much faster backup for NAS (networked-attached storage) N series products - supplied by NetApp - and NetApp FAS arrays by offering NDMP. This can reduce the time needed for incremental file backups from hours to minutes, such a comparison again pointing up IBM's oddity in not giving us de-dupe ratio guidance. Files on these products can now be backed up directly to tape, either directly-attached devices or accessed across a network. This is because NetApp has integrated its SnapMirror to Tape and Snapshot technologies with TSM 6 to achieve an up to 12X increase in backup speeds for volumes and even larger speed increases for snapshots of new, changed, and deleted files because identification of files not needing backup is so much faster. TSM 6 also offers item-level recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, plus full image backups of virtual machines in VMware environments. There are enhanced monitoring and reporting facilities as well. TSM offers backup for data on laptops, desktops, servers and mainframes, and supports both disk to disk and disk to tape backup. The v 6.0 product will be available on March 27.
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