vStor – The beating heart of our data protection solution

At the heart of every data protection solution is the repository where the data the data protection solution is protecting resides. The beating heart of Catalogic's data protection solution DPX is the vStor.

Our vStor backup repository is a flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players. 

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block based storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support. 
vStor can be architected to meet your needs. We support physical severs and virtual servers and any form of block storage. 
If you are interested in a dedicated appliance we also offer 3 pre-built vStor appliances – 24TB, 48TB and 100TB. See more details on those here

IBM Spectrum Protect 7.1.3 - The Hybrid Data Protection Enabler

It's been 21 months since I last blogged on here, I could use all the excuses in the world but I'm glad to say my drive to get the blog back into a state where useful info is being posted on a regular basis is back and burning bright. 

On that note I'm going to jump into the world of Data Protection to talk about what's happening with the recently re-branded Spectrum Protect (previously TSM and FCM). Spectrum Protect 7.1.3 was announced on the 26th August and is being released at the end of this week on September the 11th and has a host of new features well worth discussing. 

The top enhancement in this release in my eyes is the introduction of optimised next generation data-duplication processing via storage pool containers. So what?? I already have TSM Spectrum Protect with deduplication. 
The current deduplication methodology utilised in Spectrum Protect is relatively inefficient as it requires backups to complete, identification of the duplicates to run and then reclamation to complete prior to the duplicates being removed. As an out-of-band process this causes management overhead and means the mobility of data is limited as you needed reclamation to complete before you could perform node replication.  

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