IBM Tivoli Storage Manager


IBM Spectrum Protect is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect family.
It enables backups and recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.
This product is part of the IBM Spectrum Software Defined Storage suite of products and is unrelated to the Tivoli Management Framework.

History

TSM descended from a project done at IBM's Almaden Research Center around 1988 to back up VM/CMS systems. The first product that emerged was Workstation Data Save Facility. WDSF's original purpose was to back up PC/DOS, OS/2, and AIX workstation data onto a VM/CMS server. WDSF morphed into ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager and was re-branded Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999.
The TSM database was a bespoke B+ tree database; although the TSM database uses many of the same underlying technologies as IBM's DB2, has a SQL engine, and supports access through ODBC, the database has an architectural limit of approximately 530 GB, and 13 GB of log space. Starting with TSM 6.1, released in May 2009, TSM uses a DB2 instance as its database.

Product details

TSM maintains a relational database and recovery log for logging, configuration, statistical information, and object metadata. v5.5 DB pages are always 4KB, and partitions every 4MB. Single row inserts only. On average, 20GB of space is consumed for every 25 million objects. Shallow directory structures use less TSM DB space than deeper paths. This database may generally be queried via an emulated SQL-98 compliant interface, or through undocumented SHOW, CREATE or DELETE commands.
Actual user data is managed via a cascading hierarchy of storage media presented as raw devices, filesystem containers, streaming tape or optical media. Additionally, emulated tape from a Virtual Tape Library or EMC Centera WORM archival device is supported. Duplicate copies of any subset of data may be created on sequential media for redundancy or off-site management.
The 5.5 release of the TSM Server is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Windows Server, and z/OS. The TSM Client of the same release is supported on NetWare, macOS, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, z/OS, Solaris, and Windows 32/64-bit. The 6.1 release of the TSM Server is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows Server, while the TSM Client is supported on the same operating systems as 5.5. On October 21, 2011, TSM 6.3 was released.

Components

Tivoli Storage Manager as a system is made up of several different components. The major components of TSM include: TSM Server, TSM Client, TSM Storage Agent, TSM Data Protector, TSM Operation Center and TSM Administration Center. Each of these provides important functionality to a Tivoli.

Agents

The TSM architecture makes use of two special-purpose agents. The LAN-Free Storage Agent is a limited function TSM server which is configured as a library client and uses server-to-server communication to coordinate the use of storage resources which are configured to TSM but which are also presented to the storage agent. Usually this LAN-free and server-free backup agent is installed on the specific client; however, it is network accessible and could be utilized to bypass network bottlenecks. One example would be to connect via infiniband between two Bladecenter chassis, where one has SAN attachment to tape, and the other does not. This could bypass limited ethernet bandwidth without having to move the TSM server instance.
The NDMP API agent is used by NetApp devices and other network attached storage devices to allow backup access to the appliance itself rather than having to back up the device via an attached NAS client.appliance direct access to shared tape.

Administration

Administrative functions are accessed through the TSM Administrative command line interface tool or via a web based portal application known as the TSM Operations Center. There are also third-party admin API clients like TSMManager or the Power Administrator for TSM.

Subproducts & Other Products

Enterprise Edition Features

IBM's naming convention is to prefix every product name with "IBM Tivoli Storage Manager"; most products require an additional license. See also IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for more information on IBM's TSM product for block-level, continuous data protection.