Spectrum Protect Plus Announced

This week IBM made the public pre-announcement that they have a new data protection offering in Spectrum Protect Plus which will be released in Q4.

What is Spectrum Protect Plus? 

IBM are calling it the future of data protection, recovery and data reuse. 
It's a new data protection platform packaged as an OVA that simplifies VM backups for VMware vSphere and Hyper-V that can be implemented as a standalone solution or integrated with IBM Spectrum Protect for longer-term retention of data. Below is an architectural overview of how the product works.

Upgrading from TSM 5.5 to TSM 6.3

With the End of Support date for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 likely to be confirmed in the near future it’s time for all businesses that still have TSM 5.5 instances running to look at upgrading to TSM 6.3.

So apart from the fact 5.5 is approaching EOL what other benefits do you get from upgrading to TSM 6.3? Well for a start the underlying database has changed from btree to DB2 significantly improving the scalability, performance and reliability of TSM, providing you with the ability to protect more data with less TSM servers. Additional enterprise features such as server side deduplication, client side deduplication, node replication and automatic client updates are also introduced within TSM 6.3. The table below provides a very high level version comparison. 

	TSM v5.5 (Q2 07)	TSM V6.3 (Q4 11)
TSM Server Capacity (Objects)	0.5 Billion	4 Billion
Disaster Recovery (TSM EE)	DR Planning	Client Data Replication
Reporting and Monitoring	Yes - Limited via Operational Reporting	Yes - Tivoli Monitoring (Customised Cognos reports can be created via Tivoli Common Reporting )
VMware Support	In-guest	TSM for VE v6.3
Target-Side Data Deduplication	NA	Yes
Source-Side Data Deduplication	NA	Yes
Automatic Client Software Updates	NA	All O/S
Unified Recovery Management	NA	TSM Suite for Unified Recovery