Tivoli Storage Manager | Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Administrators Companion (IT-Administrators Companion)

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Tivoli Storage Manager is the new name for Tivoli Adstar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM). Version 3.1 is an enterprise backup/restore software solution originally from IBM. Tivoli Storage Manager is usually configured to perform one initial full backup and incremental backups thereafter, although you can run full backups any time.

Tivoli Storage Manager can run multiple backup processes concurrently; while individual performance might be slow, overall performance is usually acceptable. The slow individual performance is a consequence of Tivoli Storage Manager's unique "one full, incremental forever" architecture. As Tivoli Storage Manager attempts to back up each file, it must first verify that the file meets the policy that the administrator has specified. Having to check each file before backup degrades the performance somewhat. Tivoli Storage Manager masks this by performing only incremental backups (by default) that require the movement of much less data across the network, and that, theoretically, result in a shorter backup time. This characteristic is evident when performing backups of larger files, as Tivoli Storage Manager can move large files at reasonable speeds.

Another performance indicator is how well the software restores large amounts of data. Because of the architecture, when recovering multiple files, Tivoli Storage Manager restore times are substandard as compared to other products. Before you implement a Tivoli Storage Manager environment, you should investigate other features that are relevant to its performance, such as colocation and reclamation.

Server Recommendations

An important factor when configuring a Tivoli Storage Manager backup/restore server is the inclusion of sufficient disk space for the Tivoli Storage Manager database and recovery logs. With more versions of a file to be kept and longer retention times, Tivoli Service Manager requires a significant amount of overall disk space. The minimum server specifications should consist of 256 MB of RAM, 200 MHz processor(s), and sufficient disk space for the database and recovery log files.

TIP
For improved reliability, allocate database and recovery log volumes in an NTFS file system, not a FAT file system. By using NTFS, you can take advantage of the Windows 2000 capability to recover from problems that can occur during I/O to a disk.