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IBM Says Improved Tivoli Storage Manager Coming to OS/400
by Alex Woodie
IBM Tivoli is reaching out to OS/400. At the COMMON
conference in Nashville last week, IBM said that later this year its Tivoli subsidiary would release improved
OS/400 support in Tivoli Storage Manager, an archiving and backup/restore system for large companies
that allows data from heterogeneous servers to be backed up to, and recovered from, a centralized server.
Tivoli Storage Manager Version 5.1 was announced April 8 and became generally available April 12. IBM
committed to providing support for OS/400 with the next release of the product, Version 5.2, in the second
half of the year. The OS/400 version will be based on the AIX version and will run under PASE, the AIX
runtime environment that allows compiled AIX applications to run under OS/400.
With Version 5.1, the Tivoli Storage Manager client supports OS/400 and allows OS/400-resident data and
applications to partake of Tivoli Storage Manager's backup and recovery facilities, as long as the Tivoli
Storage Manager server component is running somewhere else. With the forthcoming release, users will be
able to load the server component onto their iSeries servers, allowing them to manage and control backups
and recoveries across a number of server platforms from the iSeries. When this release is delivered--
probably in August--the iSeries will have the same level of Tivoli Storage Manager support and
functionality as the pSeries, a rarity in the Tivoli world, where almost nothing is managed from OS/400.
Jose Iglesias, the director of Tivoli storage management products, said OS/400 used to be the number-two
platform in his division when the ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager was supported on the AS/400.
The last release of ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager for AS/400 was announced in 1999, and since
then Tivoli hasn't provided support for OS/400 with its latest backup and recovery software, Tivoli Storage
Manager.
Now, Iglesias says, the iSeries' stature is being boosted in his division. "We were lost in the woods there for
a while," he said.
Let's take a look at the Version 5.1 announcement, as it brings some important changes to Tivoli Storage
Manager. With this release, Tivoli has introduced Tivoli Storage Manager Enterprise Edition, a more
sophisticated version of Tivoli Storage Manager designed for disaster recovery needs. With the Enterprise
Edition, Tivoli has consolidated several Tivoli products, including Tivoli Disaster Recovery Manager, to
form its premier tape-based disaster recovery solution.
Designed primarily for large companies with huge amounts of data, the Enterprise Edition builds on the
plain vanilla Tivoli Storage Manager with two main enhancements. First, the Enterprise Edition will create
a detailed "recovery plan" that lists the particular steps and includes the scripts you'll use to get your
business running again. Second, the Enterprise Edition uses hierarchical storage management to continually
send infrequently used live data files to offline storage, but keep a "data-stub" of it online so that it can be
easily accessed in the event of a disaster.
A Tivoli Storage Manager server can support 37 different client platforms, including OS/400, OS/390,
Windows NT, AIX, HP-UX, Windows 98, Solaris, Linux, SGI IRIX, Netware, and Macintosh. The
software supports more than 500 different tape drives and library systems.
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