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
|
