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TSM admins, it's decision time! You have run out of capacity (or you know that day is coming) in your tape library and are (or will be) deploying additional tape drives, media or maybe even an additional tape library to meet the demand. This needs to happen quickly because your Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are at risk and whether or not you know it, you are at a crossroads and have an important decision to make: do I take this opportunity to move to ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’ or continue to use
March 20, 2012
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If you think that tape cannot or should not play a central role in data management within an increasingly virtualized world we think you’re wrong…
Tape remains the most cost-effective method of storing data for the mid-to-long term (archive) and it serves as a good secondary copy for backup data for use in disaster recovery (DR) situations and both of those things are unlikely to change any time soon. However, with the exception of continual improvements to the amount of data that can be
March 6, 2012
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You've likely heard the expression "you get what you pay for" and this holds true for tape support in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). While TSM comes with built-in support for tape at no additional cost you aren't getting a whole lot of functionality either. Here's how it shakes out...
What you get out of the box
TSM provides the following basic support for all tape libraries out of the box:
Tape library sharing (media and drives)
Support for a single device path to each
January 26, 2012
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Thin provisioning is key to enabling the efficient use of tape. Yes, you read right. TAPE!
Thin provisioning is usually associated with disk and it has become a key feature to enable the efficient use of disk systems. Every major disk system vendor offers some form of thin provisioning and thin provisioning has made its way into virtualization software like VMware. But the application of thin provisioning to the tape world is largely absent (with the notable exception of the fact that we, at
January 11, 2012
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On The Networker Blog, Preston de Guise makes a lot of observations that are spot-on and I would agree with 100% but there are a few that beg larger questions and further consideration and, at least as it applies to dedupe, I would say that Preston is wrong.
First, long term data retention for regulatory reasons will continue to use tape per point #2. Absolutely; we're in sync there. But, is that data being stored as a backup or an archive? To some extent it depends on what you mean by an ar
December 8, 2011
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Some analysts and vendors have, for years, been droning on that tape is not suited to backup/recovery solutions. The way this is typically done is with a ‘tick in the box’ side-by-side comparison. To anyone in the industry, this is a kind of “no-duh” position – disk and solid state technologies have progressed significantly in recent years and with their higher performance characteristics make them the more sensible choice for most backup/recovery needs. Oftentimes, however, this messa
October 11, 2011
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Recently Storage Newsletter, on the back of a report issued by Santa Clara Consulting Group (SSCG), stated that "Tape Is Not Dead, But Dying..."1. This opinion is based on worldwide tape sales, which declined 9% according to SSCG and the fact that the number of firms who are successfully growing their revenues as a result of selling tape systems has shrunk to only one - Spectra Logic. On the surface of it, this seems a very logical and well-considered view. However, in my opinion this is only be
September 20, 2011
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It might sound like I am encouraging you to commit a federal crime but trust me, I don't want you to go to jail. What I do want to do is help you identify ways to take advantages of inefficiencies in your current storage environment that will let you discover hidden pockets of money that can be used more wisely.
First, it is important to understand that if your organization has imposed budget restriction on you that have essentially meant that your money has all but dried up, there are things
August 7, 2011
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In various conversations I have had recently, and even in the press, there seems to be a common misconception that if you backup your data you are ready for a disaster. There are situations in which this is the case but with the emergence of disk-based backup often this is no longer true. Knowing whether or not you are ready for a disaster is a matter of examining where your data resides.
Why is location so important?
Providing a safe location to store your data once it has been backed up i
July 21, 2011
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Gresham Storage Solutions is not a large organization and even though we have a three letter acronym – GSS – we are not known by this name or held in the same regard as EMC, IBM, SUN, etc, so I frequently hear people say things like “we only deal with big corporations” or “who is Gresham”. This is the plight of many organizations of similar size to Gresham Storage Solutions; to be dismissed not because of product quality or organizational capability but because smaller organizations
June 13, 2011
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