The biggest feature in the releases for me Is the vSnap replication for Spectrum Protect Plus. Why? Because this means Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.1 can be implemented as a standalone product to protect virtual environments. For longer term retention and offload to tape it makes sense to still offload to Spectrum Protect. Hopefully the offload function is made more elegant over time and integrated into Spectrum Protect Plus as expected.
The replication is ZFS based asynchronous replication. Its very simple to configure via the Spectrum Protect Plus GUI. You setup the storage partnership under backup storage and define the replication in the SLA. You can define the frequency of the replication and if you wish the retention policy to be the same as the source selection here as well.
One of the other key enhancements for Spectrum Protect Plus is the introduction of application aware backups. The two applications seeing the enhancement in 10.1.1 are SQL and Oracle. For both SQL Server and Oracle Database, full restore and Instant Access scenarios are supported. In addition, for SQL server, you can use the log backup feature for continual backup of transaction logs to a specified destination. Support for additional applications will be introduced in subsequent releases.
On first login following an upgrade its obvious to see the enhancements made based on the fact the menu contains significantly more options. The interface is slick, but still needs some work to enable you to interactively drill down into the summary’s, hopefully that comes in the next release.
The upgrade process is simple and fully documented here. Just allow for approx. 15 minutes downtime if updating the Spectrum Protect Plus vApp. Allow longer if using vSnap servers and VADP proxies as well.
Talking of VADP proxies they can now be registered using the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus interface. Making deployment simpler. When updates to the VADP proxy software are made available, they can be installed by using the VADP proxy pane in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. New configuration options allow you to set the transport modes to be used by the VADP proxy, the compression type, and the log retention schedule. A big tick in the box for making implementation simpler.
For day to day management VMware tagging is now supported as a filter method when creating backup jobs in Spectrum Protect plus and can be preserved on restore. This is a very useful feature that can make the scheduling of VMs to backup significantly easier.
Great to see following a customer request via ourselves IBM have added protection for non-volatile-random-access memory (NVRAM) files. This means when you backup a VM in VMware the backup includes the NVRAM file which stores to state of the BIOS software for the virtual machine. Meaning complete VM recovery including NVRAM files is now possible.
Roles can now be created. This means the product can be enabled for self-service allowing users to be created with specific roles and access to specific resource groups. Great for backup teams and admins to enable self-service access for recoveries.
Finally with this release Spectrum Protect Plus is now available as an IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions service. This enables a seamless Hybrid setup using Spectrum Protect Plus and IBM Cloud. This is becoming more and more important as organisations have a requirement for a Cloud-friendly solution and enables us to ensure customers data is protected and stored in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
Sound interesting? Want more detail? Speak to me to find out more via william.bush@tectrade.com. We would be happy to setup a 30 day trial for you.
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