Spectrum Protect 8.1.4 - What's New in the World of Spectrum Protect?

On the 15th of December IBM released Spectrum Protect 8.1.4. 

The release contains a raft of exciting enhancements for us data protection geeks.
If you're a Spectrum Protect customer using the Operations Center, Hierarchical Storage Management, Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments, Spectrum Protect for ERP, Spectrum Snapshot for Unix, Oracle & SQL or Spectrum Protect for Databases you have something to get enthused about in this release. 
Below is an overview at a very high level of the enhancements within 8.1.4.

Here I'm going to discuss a few key product updates from my perspective.

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.