In June 2026 IBM GA'd a new version of IBM Copy Services Manager
Copy Services Manager 6.3.18.0 Download
IBM Copy Services Manager is a storage replication product that provides a single place to manage all the replication across your IBM storage environment. With IBM Copy Services Manager customers can simplify the management of their replication solutions while providing disaster recovery and high availability to their applications.
As always, we're very excited to provide the following key features being released in this new version.
We develop Copy Services Manager in an agile development cycle and as such have included a number of customer requested features!!!
Support for FlashSystems Partition Migration
Support for FlashSystems Policy Based HA (no replication)
IDEA CSM-I-236 - Allow for customer descriptions on Scheduled Task external script actions
IDEA CSM-I-244 - Support for both TLSv1.3 and TLSv1.2 connections to different z/OS systems
Support for Webhook Notifications from CSM to external applications
IDEA CSM-I-65 - Support for creating Personal Access Tokens for REST API Authentication
IDEA CSM-I-65 - Support for creating Client Certificates for REST API mTLS Authentication
Support for FlashSystems Partition Migration
- IBM FlashSystems has a feature that allows customers to migrate a source or target partition to another FlashSystem within the FlashSystem Grid. There are different reasons you might want to migrate a partition, from workload balancing to hardware upgrades.
- Since the CSM server is monitoring and helping to manage Snapshots or Policy Based Replication on each FlashSystem, the server has to seamlessly support this migration allowing the customer to move their partitions without having to worry about updating the CSM server.
- For the CSM server to handle the partition migration property, prior to performing the migration it's important to ensure that the CSM server is connected to all FlashSystems involved in the migration (old and new) if not all systems in the Grid.
- The Migration is all managed from the FlashSystem GUI or through Storage Insights. During the course of the migration, you may see the CSM sessions automatically start displaying an HA relationship for the volume group. The FlashSystem uses the HA relationship in order to swap the partitions without any application downtime.
- After you have committed the migration, the CSM sessions should no longer show that HA relationships, and all Snapshot and Policy Based Replication sessions will automatically start showing the new source or target Storage system on that session.
- In addition, as long as the FlashSystem is at 9.1.2 or higher, all Scheduled Tasks tied to the Snapshot or Policy Based Replication sessions will automatically start issuing the commands to the new session.
Support for FlashSystems Policy Based HA (no replication)
- In the past, while the CSM server automatically created a session for any Volume Group with an Asynchronous Replication Policy, a session was never created it the session only had a High Availability policy. We did support a PBRHA setup, where the CSM session would show all three storage systems, the ones for local HA and the one for remote DR. But we didn't handle when it was only HA.
- Starting with 6.3.18, we have renamed the Asynchronous Policy Based Replication session type to a more generic Policy Based Replication type, which can now support all three flavors of Policy Based Replication: PBHA (only HA), PBR (only DR) or PBRHA (HA + DR)
- When the CSM server sees a volume group with a PBHA policy, the Policy Based Replication session will be created showing the H1 Management System and Secondary System. But no H2 System will show. This will show in the session details as well as the dynamic image where you will not see an arrow between the sites.
- Should you eventually apply a DR site to this partition and volume group, the session will automatically pick that up and start showing the H2 system along with the status of the asynchronous replication.
- One of the primary reasons we chose to start supporting PBHA, is that when creating a Snapshot or Safeguarded Snapshot schedule for a Volume Group, CSM can make this setup a LOT easier for you as you can setup the Scheduled Task to issue against this Policy Based Replication session. When you do this, you do not have to keep track of which System is currently the Management System and which one's the secondary system. That means you don't need two different schedules for the two system...and you don't need to switch which one is enable and which one is disabled. In the event of an unplanned swap, Snapshots will seamlessly continue to be issued with no manual handling necessary!!!
IDEA CSM-I-236 - Allow for customer descriptions on Scheduled Task external script action
- Scheduled Task Actions for running an External Script now have the option for a user defined Description. You can optionally enter a description on the Action creation or modify screen that best helps describe what action the script being executed will take.
- This is helpful in the quick hover over summary as well as the full summary or modify task wizard. It's a far clearer way to be able see what exactly the task is doing at a glance.
IDEA CSM-I-244 - Support for both TLSv1.3 and TLSv1.2 connections to different z/OS systems
- The CSM server can connect to multiple different z/OS systems at the same time. Each of those z/OS systems though may be setup to with the socket using a different TLS protocol. If you're company is in the middle of migrating to TLSv1.3, it's possible that some systems have moved to TLSv1.3 while others have not yet.
- The CSM zosclient.properties file allows customers to set the protocol that the CSM server would try to use when connecting to the z/OS system...however, prior to this release, you could only specify either TLSv1.3 or TLS1.2....you couldn't do both.
- So with 6.3.18, you can now provide a comma separated list of protocols to use. The CSM server will try the TLSv1.3 protocol first, but if that server doesn't support it, the CSM server will fall back on TLSv1.2.
Support for Webhook Notifications from CSM to external application
While the CSM server has supported email and SNMP event notification for awhile, neither of these methods of notification are really ideal for automation frameworks or other applications that rely on status from the CSM server.
Starting with CSM 6.3.18, you can now define a webhook on the CSM server, to tell the CSM server to make a event call to the external automation or application in the case of an event.
On the Settings->Alert Notification panel, you can now click on Add Webhook and define the URL and authentication information to the external application and then choose to send all notifications or choose one or more of our notification categories. When events occur, CSM will then send the webhook to any of the defined webhook listeners.
For example, CSM tracks Threat Detection events from the FlashSystem, zSecure and in the near future DS8000. When we get a Threat Detection event, if you have an application that needs to react to that event, you can setup a webhook in CSM to automatically be notified.
IDEA CSM-I-65 - Support for creating Personal Access Tokens for REST API Authentication
CSM already supports session tokens which are short lived (expire within 2 hours) tokens allowing REST calls to the CSM server.
These tokens make it difficult to manage long running applications or automation that requires constant calls to the CSM server. The userid and password would be needed every 2 hours to continue to call the CSM server.
In CSM 6.3.18, we now support Personal Access Tokens. These are longer lived tokens that a user creates by logging into the CSM GUI. After creating the Personal Access Token, the customer can copy it and then store it safely in the automation and/or application for use, until they timeframe they specified for expiration has passed. This allows for the automation to no longer require the userid and password to make calls to the CSM server.
Admins or User admins however have the ability to control Personal Access Tokens. They have to first enable the ability to use them, but they can also set a maximum expiration time for Personal Access Tokens, that meets the security needs of the business.
In addition, admins or user admins can see existing user tokens and revoke any tokens at any time they want.
IDEA CSM-I-65 - Support for creating Client Certificates for REST API mTLS Authentication
In CSM 6.3.18, in addition to the Personal Access Tokens we now support Client certificates. These are similar to the longer lived tokens but use an x.509 certificate to provide mTLS authentication to the CSM server. You can create a certificate by logging into the CSM GUI. After creating the cert, the user can download it and then store it safely in the automation and/or application for use, until they timeframe they specified for expiration has passed. This allows for the automation to no longer require the userid and password to make calls to the CSM server.
Admins or User admins however have the ability to control certificate access. They have to first enable the ability to use them, but they can also set a maximum expiration time for certificates, that meets the security needs of the business.
In addition, admins or user admins can see existing certificates and revoke any certificates at any time they want.
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