IBM Spectrum Protect now what?

October 4th, 2016

Diana Wozniak-Flack
Director of Service Delivery

By now, most of you have survived your upgrade from TSM 5.x to TSM 6.x, or maybe you upgraded directly from TSM 5.x to TSM 7.x. Well done… take a moment to congratulate yourself. It was certainly not a task for the faint of heart. Like me, you probably found yourself asking “now what?” You have probably heard about the new features and functions that are included in Spectrum Protect, but you may have no idea how to start using them, or which ones are important. Let’s take a look at the product changes.

First of all, IBM has launched a major re-branding of the entire IBM storage product line. All of the products have been re-named to include the word Spectrum in the product name. Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Scale, etc. IBM introduced TSM 7.1.4 as the first newly branded Spectrum Protect.

With the introduction of Spectrum Protect, IBM has done a comprehensive upgrade to the product, to position itself for future growth, as well as to clean up a lot of the customer pain points, with the product.

The Spectrum Protect upgrades are in the following categories:

  • Virtual Machine data protection. Functionality for both VMware and Hyper-V that includes incremental forever backups, hardware assisted snapshots and improved copy management. Additionally, the addition of a self-service restore portal for your administrators.
  • In line Data De-duplication. Spectrum Protect introduces a new type of storage pool called a Container. This container is object oriented and allows data to be de-duped in line, without the need of any post processing tasks. Containers are key to the next three items.
  • Reduce Data Protection Costs. By reducing the amount of data that Spectrum Protect is managing, you will reduce your backup infrastructure costs by up to 53 percent. Spectrum Protect provides a wide choice of licensing plans.
  • Cloud Data Protection. Cloud portal integration for both private and public cloud environments. You can build your own cloud platform or use a third party platform.
  • Risk mitigation. Spectrum Protect now provides comprehensive multi-site replication for disaster recovery management, as well as file, block and data object protection.

The most beneficial upgrade for my clients has been the Virtual Machine data protection. VMware and Hyper-V platforms make up the majority of the operating system platforms in today’s environments. By exploiting the Virtual platform benefits and matching them with Spectrum Protect, administrators now have a superior backup solution.

Mainline Information Systems has a wide depth of experience in implementing these features, in both large and small environments. Our implementation programs allow you to choose the best solution for your environment.

Please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly, or click here to contact us with any questions.

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