IBM White Paper Sample

Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack extends disk-based, block-level incremental data capture to a repository in another location, sending changed blocks of data over a WAN or Internet connection. Scheduling and retention policies can be set individually for each location to meet the specific needs of the business, while avoiding unnecessary costs in bandwidth and storage. With Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, you can still recover any data from any point in time to get your operations back up and running quickly, even if an entire office or region is affected by an event such as a hurricane, flood, earthquake or even a widespread power outage.

Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack was designed to be as bandwidth efficient as possible to help minimize the impact on other applications that rely on WAN and Internet links. A primary feature in addressing this goal is the policy engine that schedules replication sessions. In most cases, a once-a-day transfer of changed data is sufficient for DR protection, especially if local backups/snapshots are occurring frequently during the day. A once-a-day policy will transfer only the blocks that have changed since the previous day, and only the latest version of that block will be transferred even if it was changed hundreds of times during the day—which is common with database applications. The transfer can be scheduled to occur in the middle of the night when other WAN traffic is at a minimum. Consider this in contrast to common replication products that copy everything that is changed, clogging up bandwidth on a continual basis.

Other performance features in Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack include data differencing (sending only the changes from the previous job run), compression, bundling of small files to help reduce TCP/IP overhead, bandwidth throttling and multi-threading.