Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

LXI last week announced a new version of MMS, its suite of backup, recovery, media management, and vaulting software for OS/400 servers. MMS Version 5.1 offers users a new "intelligent" backup and recovery option that ensures a timely backup is made after objects change. The software also offers enhanced oversight of the backup routine, an important enhancement in this post-Enron era for helping companies ensure compliance with government regulations--and potentially protecting companies from private lawsuits.

LXI's MMS suite is composed of three core products, including MMS/bms for backup and recovery management, a tape management component called MMS/tms, and MMS/vms, the vault management utility; pricing for these three products starts at $5,500 for a P05 server. Users pay extra for MMS/hsm, a hierarchical storage add-on to MMS, and for MMS/spl, which includes OS/400 spool files in the MMS-managed backup and recovery process. The major enhancements with the 5.1 release affect the core MMS suite and MMS/hsm.

With MMS/bms 5.1, LXI is offering its users another way to manage backup and recovery. LXI's new intelligent-backup-and-recovery facility is designed to simplify the development of a comprehensive backup strategy by automating the process of selecting objects to be backed up. Instead of requiring users to manually create and maintain backup policies, lists, and procedures, MMS/bms does the dirty work for them, and ensures that every object, file, and program is backed up with the freshest data, LXI says.

"It works by looking at the last change date, and comparing it to our database," says Tim Kormos, LXI product manager. "If it's not current, we back it up." Kormos says this new feature is a good alternative to using IBM's Save Changed Objects command, because that command does not back up the entirety of an object if it's changed, only the part that has changed. For example, if something should happen to a tape that had the last full copy of an object before changed data started being backed up, the user would be out of luck. LXI's method also cuts down on the amount of tape used, because the Save Changed Data command continually backs up all data that's changed since the last full library save. "You're only backing up the things you need to back up on a daily basis," he says.

The new automated backup facility is offered as an option with MMS/bms, but users can opt to control their backups using the traditional list method. Kormos says users will find the new automated method will back up quite a lot of data the first go-around, then it will quiet down. LXI offers a recovery approach that's compatible with this new backup technique, as well.

The new version of MMS also helps companies achieve their particular backup goals. This is a key point, because a company backing up its data for disaster-recovery purposes will have a different strategy than a company that is backing up data to comply with new federal guidelines, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or HIPAA, Kormos says. In the disaster-recovery scenario, the data will be kept on hand until it's needed, or until a more up-to-date copy replaces it. With regulatory compliance, on the other hand, the company usually wants to keep it only for a certain period of time, then ensure that it is destroyed.

With MMS 5.1, LXI is helping companies provide oversight on the backup process to ensure that they are done correctly, on a regular basis. The software has new facilities for implementing "control points" at certain places in the backup process. These control points could result, for example, in the generation of a document that ensures a particular process has been correctly carried out (or could show, alternatively, the auditor who screwed up). This level of accountability is essential in complying with new regulation and avoiding lawsuits, Kormos says. "How can I be sure that you're backing up, putting records out for record retention purposes, and bringing them back?" he says. "The reporting capabilities of MMS have been enhanced to develop these control points."

The financial scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and others are largely responsible for this new generation of regulatory laws, Kormos says. "They're essentially legislating good business practices," he says. At the same time, these scandals have awakened lawyers to the vast "gold mines" of data that companies keep on their backup tapes, he says. Whereas companies may only be required to keep copies of e-mail, for example, for 45 days, many companies haven't bothered removing those e-mails from their general disaster-recovery tape backups, and the data on those tapes is fair game in a court of law. Precedents have been set that give plaintiffs' lawyers access to these files if they exist, even if the company already erased the primary tape to which those e-mails were saved, per government regulations, Kormos says.

LXI has sought to give companies more granularity in their data-retention policies with the new release of MMS. Instead of having two separate backups--one for disaster-recovery and one for regulatory compliance--MMS has been enhanced to allow companies to reduce their exposure by keeping only a single copy. By keeping close tabs on the period of time the data is required to be retained, and by alerting the operator to move the portion that must be retained to a second tape at the end of the retention period, data that is no longer required to be retained can be erased as soon as it is legal to do so, Kormos says.

"It's the record retention that bites people," Kormos says. "We want to set it up so that it's as automated as possible, so nobody accidentally forgets to do that, and the company gets a subpoena and figures out these operators haven't been reinitializing the tapes on a daily basis, and they have two years' worth of stuff that they're liable for."

LXI has also enhanced its hierarchical storage management product, MMS/hsm, which provides an easier-to-use interface for the OS/400 disk-compression facility. With MMS/hsm 5.1, LXI has improved the disk-space-reclamation-forecasting capability. The software now includes additional metrics and a more readable layout that tells administrators when they're going to run out of space. This release also includes new proactive problem identification features, improvements in developing an automated migration or archive management policy, and improved compatibly between iSeries storage pools managed with MMS/hsm and other storage resource management products, such as those from Veritas, Legato, and IBM Tivoli.