Originally posted by: bobby_g
Complexity abounds in the world of #data protection, backup and recovery. Organizations struggle with complex procedures that take forever to setup and implement. System maintenance is always an ongoing challenge. The synchronized coordination between those that are responsible for storage allocation, the storage administrators and application owners and the backup and #VM administrators can be a responsibility nightmare.
Administrators need to complete their tasks faster and efficiently whether their data is hosted in a physical, virtual, software-defined or #cloud environment. Fast access is needed to the very latest #data that is best known as traditional data recovery right on to the new data access points like DevOps or #analytics, which is most coveted in today’s world of #ITinfrastructure and applications management.
Administrators need a lightweight solution that focuses on virtual environments and enables them to manage VM backup, recovery, and snapshot jobs easily with an easy to use intuitive dashboard for management and monitoring.
For many weeks, you have heard about such a solution.
Your data protection game changer is here!
IBM’s new, highly flexible VM availability management platform – the easiest VM backup you’ve ever seen – has arrived!
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, V10.1.0 is the new data protection and availability solution that simplifies VM as well as file recovery and access.
Anyone can administer it and it scales quickly to meet your organization’s needs. It unlocks your data to provide real business value and can either be implemented as a stand-alone solution or integrate with your current IBM Spectrum Protect environment.
With IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, you can quickly and then easily spin up virtual machines or mount Virtual Machine Disk files (VMDKs) based on read-write clones. These can be used for any situation where users need access to data. Examples of this are test-dev, reporting, and analytics. It is also enabled with a RESTful API, that can even be used as part of a DevOps workflow, which helps to enhance modern, automated software processes.
To find out more information about the new release of the product, visit the IBM Marketplace, to download the product after purchasing go to Fix Central or Passport Advantage, and to see all the functions in the V10.1.0 release, see the announcement letter.
Easy to use - point, click, get actionable data!
The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus dashboard is the focal point and provides administrators with actionable information about backup status, storage utilization, and restore options.
The dashboard overview displays the number of Protected VMs, unprotected VMs, Failed Jobs, and Running Jobs.
Additional widgets include:
Backup Storage Utilization
This widget displays the usage of your available vSnap servers as well as their capacity. Additional vSnap servers can be added to the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus environment through the Backup Storage window.
Backup Storage Summary
This widget displays your data utilization and the total capacity of your backup storage. Additionally it displays these data reduction ratios:
- Data Deduplication Ratio: The ratio of the amount of data that is protected compared with the physical space required to store it, due to removal of duplicates.
- Data Compression Ratio: The ratio of the amount of data that is protected compared with the physical space required to store it, due to data compression.
Protection by Policy
This widget displays the total number of protected VMs per SLA Policy. Use this widget to see an overview of your SLA Policy usage. The display includes SLA Policies that have been deleted but for which recovery points still exist.
System Information
This widget displays system resource utilization, including CPU, memory, Configuration, Recovery, and File Catalogs.
Watch this video on the management capabilities of the dashboard:
SLA Policy
The SLA Policy selection in the navigation allows administrators to create customized templates for the key processes involved in the creation and use of Backup jobs. The parameters are configured in SLA Policies, which can be used and re-used in Backup jobs.
To create an SLA Policy:
1. From the navigation menu, click SLA Policy.
2. Click Add. The New SLA Policy page opens. Enter all your pertinent information in the fields and click Save. The SLA Policy can now be applied to Backup job definitions.
Expand the IBM Spectrum Protect Offload section to display IBM Spectrum Protect Offload options. Offloading essentially creates two backups of your data – one on the vSnap server for short term protection, and one on the IBM Spectrum Protect server for longer term protection. Select Offload to IBM Spectrum Protect to enable offloading. Enter the backup frequency and interval through the associated pulldown menus.
The administrator can also either pick from one of the predefined gold, silver and bronze SLAs.
You can apply that service level to one or more virtual machines. If any VMs are missed, the dashboard view quickly identifies the missed machines so that the administrator can easily correct and protect those VMs.
Reports overview
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus provides a number of predefined reports, which you can tailor to meet your specific reporting requirements. Reports are based on the data collected by the most recently run Inventory job, and you can generate reports after all cataloging jobs and subsequent database condense jobs complete.
You click Report from the navigation menu to display the Report page. You can run reports with predefined default parameters or run and save customized reports driven by custom parameters.
For example:
VM Datastores Report
Review the storage utilization of your datastores, including the total free space, provisioned space, and capacities. Run the VM Datastores report to view your datastores, the number of virtual machines on the datastores, and the percentage of space available.
Use the report options to filter by Hypervisor type and specific Hypervisors to display. The Detail View Filter controls the datastores to display in the Detail View based on the percentage of space used.
Use the Show Only Orphaned Datastores filter to view datastores that do not have any virtual machines assigned to them, or virtual machines that are in an inaccessible state.
VM SLA Policy Compliance Report
The VM SLA Policy Compliance report displays virtual machines in relation to recovery point objectives as defined in SLA policies. The report displays the number of virtual machines in compliance, not in compliance, and virtual machines in which the last backup job session failed.
Use the report options to filter by Hypervisor type and specific Hypervisors to display. The report can be further filtered by virtual machines that are in compliance or not in compliance with the defined RPO.
See this video for an end -to - end demo of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus:
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Knowledge Center
The publications for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, V10.1.0 are available in IBM Knowledge Center. IBM Knowledge Center includes a combination of HTML and PDF files.
For more information:
Special thanks to Deborah Sparks, Mitch Liight and John Lacki.................