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.

Backup and Replication - Why do I need them both?

In this blog post I discuss backup and replication technologies, the purposes of both, what I recommend using and how some vendors are bundling the two functions when not necessarily needed.

The purposes of backup and replication often become blurred due to misuse or misunderstanding of the terms. I appreciate at this point I'm teaching many of you how to suck eggs but bare with me, I promise it gets interesting! 

A backup is a point in time copy of data that enables recovery in a data loss event and also the ability to recover from an earlier point in time so in the event data is changed or becomes corrupted it can be recovered. Typically backup is enabled via a software product or dedicated hardware appliance.

Replication can be a real time or point in time replica of data. In the event of data loss or corruption, data can quickly be brought back online via the replica. Replication if correctly implemented enables a quicker recovery time objective than backup and lower recovery point objective if real time replication is configured. Typically replication is enabled via a software product, built-in application capabilities or via built-in storage mirroring capabilities.

A common question I get from executives is so why do I need both?
The answer to this depends on the regulatory requirements of the business and sector you work in and also the required recovery time objective and recovery point objective of your business. However, in the majority of environments businesses use a combination of backup and replication technologies to provide a comprehensive business continuity plan.
The average cost of outages as detailed via IDC for the Fortune 1000 is $100,000 per hour with the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year being $1.25 to $2.5 billion! This proves data is the lifeblood of organisations and outages these days have a very high cost to businesses. Therefore ensuring you have a real time replica of data with a tested low recovery point and recovery time objective is crucial.
Point in time replicas or backup is then used to enable the longer retention of data so businesses can recover back over a longer period in time with a lower storage and cost footprint than replication. This is required for a number of scenarios including the event of data being manually deleted via user error, data is corrupted and not noticed for a period of time, they ensure regulatory requirements are met or data has been hit via ransomware and replicated.
Both technologies are delivering SLAs to the business.

Providing a sustainable method for backing up NAS data

Backing up large network attached storage (NAS) data is typically a painful, clunky and unrealiable process.

Many backup using the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), a protocol that enables to transportation between NAS devices and backup devices. 

The main advantage of NDMP is that it removes the need for transporting that data through the backup server itself and can directly offload to secondary storage. 

However it does have quite a few pitfalls including the following:

• NDMP is not storage agnostic
  In general you cannot backup data and restore to another array from another vendor or sometimes even another OS version. This means you need an identical array to recover onto so it is a very inflexible solution. 
• The majority of the backup software solutions do not index the files of the NDMP files
  For example in Spectrum Protect you can store a Table of Content (TOC) with the backup but if you want to restore a single file you have to load the TOC into a temporary table to work with it. This is typically very time consuming.
• NDMP doesn't really support a incremental forever strategy
  That means it doesnt scale well and you have to do a full backup periodically which is a no go with large filesystems at petabyte scale that contain billions of files. 

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.

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.