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.

VMware gets additional support for VMware Consolodated Back-up (VCB) and the vStorage API, including the ability to auto-discover new clients. The TSM server also gets the ability to push out new clients, though only for Windows clients at the moment. I feel this is a bit of a shame really, since it's fairly easy to automate deployment of Linux and AIX clients compared to Windows clients.Still, both Linux and AIX provide their own means by which to distribute applications, so this is no great loss.

Migration, backup, and copy active-data have been combined to a single operation to reduce backup windows. ERP, LAN-free and other elements also have been updated.

One final note on this release is that IBM normally support the current and immediately previous version of an application only. Therefore we can probably expect TSM v5.5 to be withdrawn from support sooner rather than later.  A lot of people have been keen to remain on TSM v5.5 due to the additional system requirements for TSM v6.1 and above due to the use of DB2 and Tivoli reporting tools, as well as the additional complexity of the migration to TSM v6.1. Therefore while people may resist upgrading to TSM v6.1 and above, IBM will be keen to retire TSM v5 completely and move people across to TSM v6 and will probably provide an aggressive withdrawal of the v5 product. Therefore you should start looking at not only an upgrade of TSM, but also a hardware refresh as well.

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Full details about the release can be found in the announcement letter here; http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS210-029