IBM Storage Protect Snapshot; part of the IBM Storage Protect Suite of products leverages storage-based snapshot technology to take online application consistent backups of your mission critical applications to enable lightning fast restores and offloaded backups and/or cloning. Going as far back as 2005, then called Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services (ACS) which later became IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (FCM), IBM Storage Protect Snapshot was probably one of the first products in the market to offer this capability.

In the age of cyber resiliency, most vendors, IBM included, encourage the use of storage-based snapshots to protect mission critical applications in conjunction with regular backups to mitigate against the risks of cyber or ransomware attacks. These technologies are typically not application aware and these storage-based snapshots are therefore only crash consistent. This means that depending on the application, recovery of these snapshots might need manual intervention to ensure application consistency. IBM Storage Protect Snapshot solves this by offering tight application integration to ensure that the storage-based snapshots are 100% application consistent and therefore facilitate a quick recovery even without the intervention of any application or database administrators.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of awareness of this product in spite of its capabilities. It supports a wide range of enterprise applications including any custom applications running on physical servers or hypervisors and a wide range of storage vendors including IBM, Dell EMC, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp and Huawei. It is able to be deployed standalone or offers tight integration for existing IBM Storage Protect customers for offloaded backup.

As a way to address this lack of awareness, this guide serves to showcase how to protect a Microsoft SQL server database and also how to protect a custom application running on IBM Storage Scale. This document is primarily meant to help IBM Technical Sellers, Business Partners and IBM customers learn how to deploy and configure IBM Storage Protect Snapshot to protect a Microsoft SQL Server database and also a custom application running on top of IBM Storage Scale. It also showcases how IBM Storage Protect Snapshot can integrate with an existing IBM Storage Protect installation.