With IBM Recently anouncing that they are no longer offering their IBM POWER6 product range, I looked at what this meant and possible upgrade options available for upgrades and how best to maximise any machines that still have spare CPU/RAM slots that could be upgraded.
The withdrawal dates for IBM POWER6 after which you can't buy new machines (nor POWER5 to POWER6 upgrades) are as follows:...

Found a nice blog that explains the difference between VCB and vStorage API's. Useful if you are looking into ways of backing your VM environment. Netbackup 7 supports both methods.

http://www.vnotion.com/?p=181

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A  web posting for a cloud/remote backup provider asked the question “is a 30 day retention policy sufficient?” and suggested that a much longer  retention policy was the way to go to ensure availability of data, whether it be 60 or 90 days or even longer. I challenge this question and believe that for many 30 days retention is excessive.

Why?

It seems that IBM hasn't slowed down the development of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) since migrating the internal database to a DB2 database, as TSM v6.2 has just been announced this week. Availability will be electronic from March 19th, with physical media a month later. (Not that many people rely on physical media for software distribution these days.)

There's some interesting new features as well with this release. The most notable feature is block-level deduplication at the client level, so if you've got a client with a lot of similar files then this feature can provide significant benefit. both in terms of storage and network utilisation. Note that this dedupes at the client level, not the server, so if two clients have the same files this feature will not dedupe between those clients. {Edit: I'm told it's actually cross-client, however I'll wait until the official documentation is available before making further comment.) If you want cross-client dedupe then this can be achieved via other means, such as file based disk storage pools or deduped based storage at the back-end.

For many years, the NetBackup™ product suite has frowned upon technologies that didn’t use full backups as they claimed it impacted the RTO. In a change of face, Symantec now offer both source and target de-duplication in both NetBackup™ and BackupExec™.

This is achieved through the PureDisk™ when storing data in a media server de-dupe pool or a PureDisk storage pool.

For more information see:  http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-symc_netbackup_7_core_DS_12995286-2.en-us.pdf

EMC also have source and target de-duplication through its acquisition of Avamar and DataDomain.

Ever wondered how to find technical information relating to TSM 6.1? Now you can find it easier with the TSM WIKI http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivolistoragemanager/Home

 

When working with clustered nodes you will often want to run the same command on all the nodes in the system.  This may be to copy a file, start or stop a daemon or any type of operation.  On Linux there are many distributed shells that are designed to do just this.  But often I find it easier just run the list of nodes in to a for loop to do much the same thing.

 

A few months ago I posted a blog about using Trunk Failover with the Cisco Gigabit Switch Module for the IBM BladeCenter.  I have been using Trunk Failover with the Linux Ethernet bonding driver for some time now and it is not without pitfalls.

NetApp have announced the integration of NetApp® SnapMirror® to Tape and SnapshotTM technologies with IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager (TSM) 6. As a result, NetApp and IBM customers using TSM 6 will experience enhanced backup and disaster recovery capabilities for data stored on NetApp FAS and IBM System Storage® N series storage devices.

TSM 6 leverages NetApp SnapMirror to Tape technology, enabling customers to use TSM Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) support to back up FAS and IBM N series volumes directly to tape or across the network to any tape device managed by TSM. This can be done without having to scan each volume to find new and changed files, helping reduce the amount of time customers need to back up their FAS and IBM N series systems, which can make the backup process up to 12 times faster.

IBM have announced the latest version of its Storage Manager family of products.

TSM is a highly scalable solution that enables the protection of data across the heterogeous data center. TSM 6.1 takes scalability to the next level by introducing DB2 as the backend database for TSM.