Originally posted by: sjo

Government, industry, or business regulations often demand that certain data be collected and retained for extended periods of time. This data might not be needed for normal operational recovery but might be required for other reasons. For example, you might have a legal requirement to retain certain data for a period of months or years, and you must demonstrate compliance.

As a storage administrator, you already ensure that necessary data is retained. And you might do this by using two sets of nodes: one to back up the data for operational recovery and another to back up the same data to meet long-term data retention requirements. However, this process can be time consuming.

To simplify the data retention process, you can install IBM Spectrum Protect™ Version 8.1.7. This new product version, released on Feb. 22, provides a streamlined approach to collecting and retaining data for extended periods of time. You can satisfy requirements both for operational data recovery and long-term data retention and you're not required to create an additional copy of the data. IBM Spectrum Protect holds the existing data in a retention set -- and ensures that the data cannot be expired. 

So, how does it work?

The concept of retention rules

You define policies, called retention rules, that determine how a server implements your data retention policies. With retention rules, you identify one or more clients whose data you want to retain. These clients can be IBM Spectrum Protect backup-archive clients or IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments virtual machines. You also specify the frequency with which the data is to be retained and for how long you want to retain it.

Retention rules generate retention sets, which are point-in-time collections of active client backup data. Each retention set is a snapshot of the active backup data objects for the specified clients. The server inventory is updated to track the data that is being retained, and this retained data remains in its respective storage pool for the required period.

Questions to answer

And now, back to our data-retention requirements. To get started, answer the following questions:

1. Which clients have the data that you want to retain?
2. How long must the data be retained?

Use the Operations Center to create retention rules and sets

To create these retention rules and retention sets, use the IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center.  On the Operations Center menu bar, click Services and Retention Rules. The graphical user interface guides you through the process:

Alternatively, you can use the IBM Spectrum Protect command line to create and manage retention rules and retention sets.

To view a demo, go to the Video library and check out the Creating retention sets for long-term data retention topic.

For more information about data retention and a wide range of other new features in IBM Spectrum Protect V8.1.7, see the product documentation in IBM Knowledge Center.