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.