If your organisation uses Tivoli Storage Management (TSM) version 5.3 to cope with ever-increasing volumes of stored enterprise data, the clock is ticking. At the end of April 2008, IBM will end support for this product, so many users will be looking to upgrade to a newer version.

In most cases that will involve a migration to TSM version 5.5, according to Mike McCaffery, a storage specialist with Logicalis. This product, he adds, offers significant advantages in terms of backup, archiving, recovery, space management and disaster recovery planning.

Key enhancements in the product include:

• Integrated key management for encrypted backups;
• Support for VMWare's Consolidated Backup (VCB) product;
• Snapshot support for Microsoft applications;
• The ability to perform multiple simultaneous restores on sequential disk;
• The ability to restart the movement of TSM instances from one server to another.

"These improvements will ensure that TSM continues to integrate seamlessly with business critical applications, whilst at the same time simplifying and improving administrative overheads. The addition of encryption integration management will help greatly improve data security, especially in any data confidential aware environment," says McCaffery.

In particular, the way that TSM version 5.5 manages the generation and storage of keys means that authorised administrators won't have to remember or retrieve individual keys for files managed by TSM. And if they leave the company or lose their passwords, access to encrypted data will be maintained, because the keys have been stored.

According to McCaffery, TSM already plays an integral role in helping many organisations optimise their storage assets, protect the integrity of their data and comply with data retention requirements.

With the new product, users can have even more confidence that they can keep running in the event of an outage and meet the exacting demands of industry regulators to produce evidential data in the event of an investigation.

Migrating from TSM 5.3, like any major product upgrade, is not without its pitfalls. The administrative interface for example has had a major make over, there are also many new configurable options and application interfaces. Without the experience of these changes, the upgrade process can be tedious and fraught with issues if the time and effort is not taken to plan, design and implement properly. Logicalis can assist in helping with this effort, by providing competent and experienced resources which can discuss the improvements that will impact you, right through to providing a fully managed upgrade project and implementation service.

Your Comments and Questions

mike, 2 months ago

Jon, I think that its a pretty fair bet that there will be an upgrade/release of TSM in the next 12 months. The answer to not upgrade really depends on what release you are on today, if its 5.3 or below and you want to stay within a supported release you should be making plans now to upgrade. If you are at 5.4 then the decision to upgrade has to be taken on an individual basis. If there is a new feature or function in the 5.5 release that you wish to leverage then make the change, if not then, personally, I would probably hold on for now, but on the understanding that I am only delaying the inevitable. I hope this helps.

Jon Wright, 2 months ago

Any idea how soon there will be an upgrade beyond 5.5? If it's going to be within another 12 months would you recommend waiting or are the number of improved features within 5.5 enough incentive to upgrade now rather than wait?

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