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The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, a client/server product providing backup, archive, and space management functions in heterogeneous distributed environments, performs extensive storage management after client data have reached the server. Beyond minimizing the amount of data that a client needs to send on successive backup operations, Tivoli Storage Manager optimizes data placement for disaster recovery, for restore operations, and for fault tolerant access. It also adapts to changes in device technology. The original design points of the product in research have been expanded to provide a comprehensive set of functions that not only facilitate backup but also support content managers and deep storage applications. The design points and functions are described in this paper.
The proliferation of distributed computing and Internet usage together with continually falling storage prices, greater disk capacities, and tremendous data growth, challenge storage administrators to adequately provide nonintrusive backup and proper recovery of data. Enterprise computer system data protection is subject to operational demands that are driven by varying business requirements and continual advancements in storage technology. A number of factors lead to inherent complexity in the seemingly mundane task of recovering data.
All data are not the same. Information that supports important business processes may be distributed across multiple applications, databases, file systems, and hosts-intermixed with data that are easily recreated and clearly less important to the enterprise. Data elements that share the same file system or host containers have varying levels of importance, depending upon the applications they support or the rate at which they are changed. The management complexity in dealing with this environment often leads to inefficient backup practices because all data are treated at the level required for the most important elements. Differentiated data requirements need to be recognized and managed in an automated way to control network and media resources and the administrative expense involved in backup processing.
Disaster recovery can involve many dimensions, ranging from simple user errors that cause the loss of word-processing files or spreadsheets, to hard drive failures that impact entire file systems or databases, to tragic losses of buildings and assets that include large-scale information technology infrastructure and storage subsystems. Backup management is usually tuned to one of these possible disaster situations at the expense of efficient recovery...