Elliot King
Elliot King, Editor in Chief of Database Trends & Applications, was invited by KEY to keynote the event. King pointed out that a big trend in IT today is that all the big disciplines in hardware and software related to database knowledge are merging. Storage today is no longer an afterthought…storage is emerging as its own issue. Another big change in storage is that more is not necessarily better. Storage is going through a paradigm shift, with new focus on consolidation, centralization, clustering, compliance, business continuity and disaster recovery.

King pointed out new technologies that have a major impact on storage. iSCSI is real and putting SANs in reach of smaller organizations. Data at the edge of the network is being captured by handhelds tied to larger data structures. Serial ATA disks are rapidly bringing disk costs down. Finally, making real progress is being made in standards that will make storage architecture plug and play in ways it never was before.

King concluded with four questions that you should ask:
  • Do you have the proper processes in place?
  • Are you testing those processes to make sure you can retrieve the data?
  • Are you sure you won’t be surprised when a recovery is executed?
  • Do you have the right tools and information to know what’s going on in your storage infrastructure to make sure it’s used correctly.
    • Don Dishinger
    Don Dishinger, Technical Sales Manager of IBM Tivoli, spoke about Tivoli Storage manager. Today’s world is getting more complex and data is growing at phenomenal rates. We typically find that once a successful Tivoli backup is installed, new data emerges and the original plans for capacity can be outstripped in 6-12 months. Compliance requirements driven by Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA are driving growth in data retention periods and necessitate further planning of backup processes.

    Dishinger noted that TSM is highly scalable, secure and the most dependable of the backup offerings today. Its central administration capability becomes important as backups increase in complexity.

    He described several important TSM considerations. Tape drives and cartridges must be sufficient in number. Storage assigned to the TSM server for diskpools needs to have adequate capacity and bandwidth. Also, adequate capacity needs to be reserved for the TSM database and recovery log. He reminded TSM users that they may need to adjust or tune their scheduling to accommodate TSM maintenance and backups. Additional workloads will increase the size of the TSM database, and adequate planning is necessary.

    TSM has GUI reporting tools for queries. SQL queries are available from the command line interface, while other database reporting tools can leverage the available ODBC interface. Operational reporting is now a permanent part of TSM, and server accounting has been around a long time for TSM administrators. All of these tools provide point-in-time views of what is happening.

    The Tivoli Enterprise Data Warehouse (TEDW) allows you to import some of this TSM point-in-tine information, as well as information from many other Tivoli products, into a central repository. This begins to address the requirements for TSM reporting on trending and capacity planning. The TEDW solution does not yet provide the TSM detail which many users require, and it is not for everyone. In addition, the data must still be analyzed and interpreted before changes are made to the customer’s TSM environment.

    Dishinger has these tips for TSM users:
  • Understand what your backup window is and provide the TSM server enough disk capacity to run your filesystem backups optimally. This will free up tape resources which may then be dedicated to database backups.
  • Allow for adequate time to create copypool (duplicate) tapes to take off site.
  • Plan for a sufficient number of tape drives; too few can cause contention with other backups and administrative jobs on the TSM server.
  • Project the growth of your TSM server database…so you’ll know when you may need to implement a second copy of TSM.
  • Occupancy….know which clients or servers are consuming up the most space within TSM, and plan or adjust as required.
    • Dishinger advised trending all this information over time to see the impact on the TSM server resources. He noted that there are other proprietary tools, like TSM Reports, that can provide additional in-depth information for observing and managing the functioning of TSM.

    Jack Ryan
    Jack Ryan is Technical Support Manager for TSM Reports.com, providers of the TSM Reports tools.

    TSM has five key areas for improvement:
  • Management - TSM management is not a common practice
  • Scaling - TSM resource requirements expand as storage capacity grows, creating a continuous scaling effect.
  • Trends - TSM staff and resources don’t have time to understand monthly backup and restore volume trends.
  • Performance - What throughputs are achievable with the given storage management requirements?
  • Compliance - Storage under TSM management may not be recoverable, in accordance with new oversight agency compliance requirements.
    • TSM Reports is a powerful management tool to capture, analyze and report the way that TSM is actually performing and how TSM can be tuned to optimal performance.

    Daily, weekly and monthly data volume trends are of significant importance within TSM for tracking. Yet these trends are not easy to determine and require extensive analysis to identify.

    TSM Reports uses standard Tivoli APIs to query the TSM Database for volume data; collecting about 1MB of statistics. The data is processed and transformed into graphic reports that can be reviewed by TSM users and the TSM Reports.com staff to determine improvements beneficial to a TSM infrastructure. Primary product deliverables are a Findings Review by TSM Reports.com analysts and a Reports Package that includes a rating system on performance and regulatory compliance areas including completion of all backups and off-site compliance issues.

    Benefits include time savings, improved resource use, reduction of admin costs, and an increase in system performance of 20-30 percent. As Ryan said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

    A datasheet for TSM Reports is available here:
    http://www.keyinfo.com/downloads/TSM_datasheet.pdf

    Pete Elliot
    Pete Elliot announced a special offer. A test drive of TSM Reports is available from Key that allows anyone to perform a 1-time read of their TSM installation using TSM Reports. This special offer is good through June 30, 2004. For more information about KEY’s TSM Reports Offer, contact Pete Elliot at pelliot@keyinfo.com.

    Questions from participants and speaker responses:

    Could you explain what you meant by Tivoli migration? Don Dishinger clarified that the term migration within the context of TSM refers to TSM data moved from a TSM pool to a disk pool. When disk pool space is overrun during backup, TSM needs to put it somewhere and usually migrates it to tape. This can slow down the backups. To run most efficiently, you need to plan enough space in your disk pool to avoid these migrations.

    What is the overhead of TSM reports on the system? Jack Ryan pointed out there is no overhead. TSM Reports takes two minutes to run and uses APIs to query data on the TSM Database.

    What is the largest system that TSM Reports has run on? Jack Ryan reported that TSM Reports has run at a TSM installation with 50-100GB of data and approximately 600 clients.