Understanding EMC Data Protection Advisor with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Applied Technology Abstract EMC ® Data Protection Advisor provides a comprehensive set of features to reduce the complexity of managing data protection environments, improve compliance with business and regulatory requirements, and reduce the risk of data loss. This white paper outlines how Data Protection Advisor helps you gain control of your IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup environment, by better understanding what is working well and what it not, enabling a proactive approach to managing your environment. March 2010
Transcript
Understanding EMC Data Protection Advisor with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
Applied Technology
Abstract
EMC® Data Protection Advisor provides a comprehensive set of features to reduce the complexity of managing data protection environments, improve compliance with business and regulatory requirements, and reduce the risk of data loss. This white paper outlines how Data Protection Advisor helps you gain control of your IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup environment, by better understanding what is working well and what it not, enabling a proactive approach to managing your environment.
EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.
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All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.
Part Number h7099
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Table of Contents Executive summary ............................................................................................5 Introduction.........................................................................................................5
IBM TSM overview ..............................................................................................5 Traditional backup........................................................................................................................ 6 TSM incremental forever backup................................................................................................. 6
How does TSM work?.........................................................................................6 TSM data flow and architecture .........................................................................7 What is DPA and what does it do? ....................................................................8 What does DPA do for TSM customers? ..........................................................9 Sample DPA reports .........................................................................................10
TSM Media Report (Scratch Pool Prediction)............................................................................ 22 Benefit .................................................................................................................................... 23
TSM day-to-day data protection reporting......................................................23 Client Summary ......................................................................................................................... 23
Benefit .................................................................................................................................... 24 Backup Save Set Summary ....................................................................................................... 24
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Backup Clients Not Backed Up.................................................................................................. 26 Benefit .................................................................................................................................... 26
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Executive summary EMC® Data Protection Advisor (DPA) provides a variety of reporting, monitoring, and alerting features that cover the distinct operating methodology of the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup solution and its standard backup capabilities.
Introduction This white paper explains the fundamentals of DPA and TSM and their interaction in operational environments.
This paper provides the following information on TSM:
• What is it? • What does it do? • How does it work? • Architecture • Internal functions • Product-specific language • Working practices • Modules and admin functions
This paper provides the following information on DPA:
• What does DPA 5.5 do? • What does DPA do for TSM customers? • Example reports including what the reports show and business benefits
Audience This white paper is intended for use by the presales personnel of EMC and its partners in order to understand and explain the fundamentals of DPA and TSM and their interaction in operational environments.
Terminology The text in italics is TSM-specific text (see the “Appendix: Glossary” on page 27 for definitions).
IBM TSM overview TSM is a client-server software framework for the backup of client data. It utilizes a dedicated onboard database to intelligently manage mainly “incremental forever” backups across a number of buffering “storage pools” in order to optimize the available resources and best position the backups according to user-defined data protection policies.
TSM employs a different paradigm to other backup applications on the market and as such requires different handling by the user and by DPA. TSM primarily uses an incremental forever backup technique that is fundamentally different to traditional applications. To explain we will contrast the traditional and TSM techniques.
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Traditional backup Traditional backup applications generally adopt an architecture whereby a weekly cycle captures changes in the environment and ensures a backup exists and a restore is possible.
The traditional backup cycle is comprised of:
• A full backup of the specified client (or filesystem or database) often on a Sunday or a period of low activity. This data is written to tapes (or disks) that are often transferred offsite physically or by electronic means.
• An incremental backup that backs up the changes to the environment since the last full or incremental and writes this to tapes (or disks) that are often transferred offsite physically or by electronic means.
• After a period, usually a week, since the first full backup, another full backup is taken and any full or incremental tapes that have expired can be returned to a scratch pool for reuse.
• All these tapes need to be scrupulously maintained and rotated onsite and offsite to ensure their location is always known should they need to be returned for a restore to take place or because the data no longer needs to be maintained, allowing tapes to be reclaimed.
• In the event of a restore being required the full tapes and any subsequent incremental tapes up until the recovery point may need to be mounted in order to restore the required data.
TSM incremental forever backup • The “incremental forever” or “progressive” paradigm that TSM uses dispenses with the more
traditional full, partial/differential weekly cycle that underpins conventional backup applications. Progressive backup requires one “full” backup followed only by incremental backups without subsequent full backups.
• Intelligent handling of environmental metadata in conjunction with the storage pool structure allows TSM restores to mount much fewer tapes and possibly read the required files directly from a near-line disk pool.
How does TSM work? TSM is highly flexible in its operation and configuration; in fact this flexibility can work against it in terms of management and standardization (see the section “What does DPA do for TSM customers?” on page 9).
The gains that TSM makes in streamlined tape handling, reduced network traffic, and optimized storage utilization are offset somewhat in that it has a number of scheduled administration and maintenance processes that need to be tightly integrated. These processes and data flows can be visualized as a living, breathing machine that must be kept in top condition to function optimally.
TSM typically has a disk pool buffer to which most data is written before being intelligently staged or migrated to tape or other hardware. These disk pools, when intelligently managed by policies in conjunction with the TSM database, allow functionality that is similar to that provided by virtual tape library functions of EMC’s Disk Library products.
The automated staging of data in pools from disk pool to tape pool to vaulted tape copy pool, for instance, can be visualized as an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) technique. This allows data to be kept on media that corresponds in both cost and restore capability with the business value of that data. There is a module of TSM that goes further in this respect called Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
Another functional efficiency enabled by the TSM DB and policy structure is TSM Reclamation. This function in TSM goes further than just allowing tapes containing expired data to be returned for reuse. Reclamation does not need to wait for all of the content of tapes in a pool to expire before reclaiming them. For instance, it can mount two tapes that are half full, copy one to the other, and reclaim one tape out of the pair of tapes.
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TSM terminology from the configuration point of view has remained almost unchanged since its inception as HSM and ADSM on mainframe decades ago; as a result it can now seem quirky and unintuitive.
Policy objects prominent in the policy structure such as “Policy Set” are little more than switches to enable the underlying structure. Key policy objects such as backup copy groups through which retention is specified are far less prominent and are always called “backup copy group.” They are differentiated only by the name of the management class in which they are embedded.
In many implementations some policy objects are effectively redundant; in order to navigate to a key backup copy group during configuration the path through connected policy objects confusingly often contains multiple references to “standard” (the default object name).
Broadly speaking there are two groups of policies:
• Policy objects that map to business environment and data management goals • Policy objects that map to storage media and devices Despite the quirkiness of the policy structure, TSM’s heritage has provided a very well-proven “holistic” approach to data management and as mentioned previously, it has offered sophisticated VTL and ILM techniques inherent in its architecture for many years.
The two main user interfaces are:
• CLI - This well-established command line interface (dsmadmc administrative client) has been widely used for many years.
• ISC - The Integrated Solutions Console is a bulky and cumbersome generalized graphical user interface that has been very badly received by the user community and is yet to be widely adopted.
This leaves TSM without direction regarding management and particularly reporting, which opens the way for DPA with its extensive capabilities.
Keep in mind the points mentioned in this section as they present challenges to the TSM user; the following pages will go on to explain how those challenges are met by DPA.
TSM data flow and architecture Starting from the backup client itself data flow can be described simplistically as follows: • TSM client software maintains a record of those file spaces that are to be backed up and whether they
have “changed” since the last backup. • Scheduled communications occur between the client and the TSM server over IP and generally only
those files that have “changed” since the last backup are then backed up over the LAN to the backup server.
• The backup server does not need a dedicated tape drive as a target for this data as a disk storage pool is usually employed to buffer this stream, allowing numerous clients to back up at the same time. The incremental forever nature of the backup minimizes network impact.
• Once written to the disk storage pool the data will remain there for a period of time dependent on policy and capacity. Whether triggered by schedule or disk pool capacity thresholds the data will generally then migrate to a tape storage pool and possibly later to a copy storage pool in order to provide an additional copy.
• Disaster recovery constituents such as TSM database backups and copy pool volumes are managed as DR media and are typically cycled offsite physically or electronically.
• Housekeeping operations such as the Expiration and Reclamation processes governed by scheduled policy run in order to free up storage capacity from data that no longer needs to be maintained. The Reclamation process can have a high tape mount overhead as it usually requires the movement of data from tape to tape.
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• When a restore is required the TSM DB knows where the nearest copy of the data resides, whether that
be on near-line disk or remotely vaulted tape and will drive the mount and read of that data as required, with restores taking priority over other operations.
• The facility exists to proactively collocate or locate all of a particular client’s backup data on restricted tape(s) through use of buffering techniques that can greatly expedite the restore process.
In short TSM backup and scheduled housekeeping operations are all interconnected and need to be tightly managed to preserve the status quo and maintain optimum operation of the environment. A comprehensive and integrated set of schedules can provide the basis for efficient data management. DPA allows the user to readily identify anomalies in these schedules and act accordingly.
What is DPA and what does it do? EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA) collects, monitors, analyzes, and reports on information from a customer’s entire data protection infrastructure, providing a unified data protection management window across their entire backup and EMC replication investment, and accelerating access to information, saving time and money, allowing faster decisions, and improving data protection. Through support for heterogeneous backup infrastructures including EMC backup solutions and support for EMC replication solutions, DPA reduces the cost and risk to manage a data protection environment, enabling our customers to get more from their existing investments and increase efficiency.
DPA is unique in terms of its breadth of data protection product support as well as its combination of advanced technical analysis combined with a deep understanding of business requirements. DPA is much more than a reporting tool. It provides the analytical capabilities of a skilled engineer working 24 x 7. DPA can give users a deep insight into their entire backup environment from viewpoints that are familiar to them. DPA gathers data from backup applications, backup servers, backup clients, network switches, SAN switches, tape libraries, NAS filers, and supported storage.
Technical backup success may not be enough detail. Is retention long enough and did it occur at the right time? What is the exposure and expected restore time? DPA provides business-level information that can be understood and acted upon.
Although reporting is an important area for customers, they need something more proactive to help them meet data protection requirements. This is where DPA’s Proactive Analysis Engine (PAE) comes in to play.
DPA has a comprehensive set of analyses that can regularly run, look for exceptions, and alert the user when it finds them. These real-time alerts can identify issues before they escalate and provide a truly proactive capability.
DPA will alert when it finds backups that are particularly slow, large, long running, or that have failed more than twice in a row. And there are many more useful analyses that can be constantly looking for exceptions that a busy engineer might otherwise not have time to notice.
DPA has a very flexible monitoring architecture. Most assets can be monitored from the collector or agent on the DPA server; however, in order to balance the load and gain additional information from some assets, a low footprint all-purpose collector can be installed on or near the asset itself. These collectors can then be tasked remotely to collect only that information that is required. This information is then written to DPA’s own database for real-time and historical reporting and analysis. The DPA GUI can present this information in a familiar manner and give the user the ability to perform advanced reporting, troubleshooting, performance management, and capacity planning operations. A comprehensive range of reports is provided with the product and each can be readily customized with the intuitive report editor.
All reports can be scheduled and e-mailed as required in numerous formats to ensure that the right people get the right information at the right time.
The menus available to a user are highly configurable for specific users or user roles in order to match the report types they are likely to require.
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DPA has very flexible role-based permissions. Views and menus can be tailored to user roles or specific users. This allows views and reports available through the GUI to be tightly targeted to the needs and responsibilities of users.
DPA allows the user to create views at will that contain any subset of those assets in the monitored environment. This enables users to visualize and report on their environment in groupings that are familiar to them, such as by Geography, Business Unit, or Customer.
These views enable the user to provide reports that show the data protection status of specific applications, business units, critical systems, systems with specific regulatory requirements, and so on. This business-based information is more useful, to both the company and its auditors, than lists of servers and their protection status.
DPA has a very flexible user structure that can be tailored to enable specific users and user roles to access the views, menus, and reports that are useful to them with the permissions that are necessary to allow efficient operation.
DPA turns the purely technical information of server names into these more useful categories. DPA provides information that is useful to a very broad range of personnel within an organization, and these users can have very different responsibilities, requirements, and skill sets.
DPA provides business-level information that can be understood and acted upon. In today’s cost-conscious world DPA provides the right people with the right information to make the right decisions at the right cost faster, optimizing utilization of what has already been purchased.
Hardware upgrades and replacements are often unnecessary when inefficiencies can be highlighted, scheduling managed, and load balanced across multiple regions. Bottlenecks can be tightly identified, preventing unnecessary hardware purchase further down the line. And software purchases are often unnecessary as unused licenses can be sitting around the enterprise that can be consolidated.
DPA highlights changes to configuration as they happen in order to be aware of departure from standards. If all applications behave differently, they are more expensive to manage. DPA can enforce standards, keeping control of the environment, increasing reliability, and reducing costs.
Additional efficiencies can be realized through automation of simple but time-consuming manual tasks such as morning checks on the prior evening’s backups.
A more detailed description of the architecture of DPA can be found in EMC Data Protection Advisor 5.5 Architecture Overview.
What does DPA do for TSM customers? TSM presents different challenges from other backup applications for the reasons explained previously.
The versatility of DPA has risen to the challenge and offers extensive TSM-specific functions in addition to DPA’s excellent generic reporting.
DPA uses the very well-proven TSM dsmadmc administrative client to issue query commands to TSM. This simple but powerful technique will be very familiar to TSM administrators.
In the previous TSM sections we discussed TSM housekeeping processes and their importance in good data management. DPA provides an intuitive graphical report that allows the user to monitor the progress and interaction of the TSM-specific administration processes to see how the processes react with each other over time and hence get a good overview of the “health” of the TSM server.
DPA also provides summary reports on the status of these processes such as migration, reclamation, expiration, media rotation, DB backups, and others, allowing the user to drill down into these summaries to view detail where required.
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DPA monitors the key TSM database with regard to its size, capacity, synchronization, health, backup success, and growth, allowing the user to extrapolate to establish if historical usage suggests that problems may occur in the future and providing rich, proactive functionality. This best-fit extrapolation can also be applied to resource utilization, capacity planning, and media reports, for instance, to alert the user to potential shortcomings in the provision of Storage Pool Capacity, Scratch Pool Availability, Expiration duration and Recovery log capacity to name a few.
The complex layered configuration architecture of TSM can make standardization and change management difficult. DPA can alert the user to any changes in configuration or policy across all servers in a worldwide enterprise, allowing gold standards to be enforced and reducing diversity, complexity, and cost.
The actual results of complex policies can be compared with the intended results using DPA. Occupancy (or capacity of data stored for each client) can be readily viewed and sorted by storage pool to ensure that the client data is being stored on media that is equivalent to the business value of the data.
In addition to these TSM-specific reports there is a comprehensive range of reports that are essential to effective management of all backup operations and allow the user to monitor, manage, and proactively meet the needs of the business.
As mentioned before, being able to create a business-based view of information is more useful to both the company and its auditors than lists of servers and their protection status. DPA turns the purely technical information of server names into these more useful categories.
The protection status of the environment can be presented in a multitude of intuitive perspectives. From one-line summary reports over the entire estate, to backup status by client or job, these summaries can be drilled in to for more detail as required. The “Report Card” (see page 24) provides a useful “traffic light” format that readily illustrates backup status by client over time with color-coded cells for each day, which again can be drilled in to for more detail as required. DPA can go further than success or failure, giving insight into slowest backups, largest backups, and most exposed clients, and unexpectedly large or small backups.
Multiple related reports can be combined in one window to provide useful cross-referencing in DPA Overviews or Control Panels.
The following pages give some practical examples and interpretations of reports in TSM environments.
Sample DPA reports These reports are best understood by viewing them in the following examples rather than by textual description.
The reader will also find a more comprehensive list of reports and the sources from which they were derived in the following documents:
• EMC Data Protection Advisor 5.5 Reference Guide • EMC Data Protection Advisor 5.5 User Guide
TSM Server Processes As mentioned in the “TSM data flow and architecture” section it is important that a TSM server has well-coordinated processes or inefficiencies and sometimes exposure can otherwise result.
DPA is capable of much more than just reporting on backup status. It can monitor, analyze, and predict anomalies in the background processes before they impact the backup process itself.
In this example we can view the TSM Server Processes and how they interact in a particular TSM environment. It is important that the sales team understands the nature of these daily schedules as Data Domain® products can be positioned to provide gains to the client in such an environment by taking on some of this function, freeing up the TSM server for more directly backup-centric activity.
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From the candle chart below the user can see how the processes react with each other over time and hence get a good idea of the “health” of the TSM server.
Figure 1. TSM Server Processes schedule – over 24 hours
Interpretation The majority of backups occur from 8 P.M. to 8 A.M. with no competition for tape resources (healthy).
After the morning backup cycle has completed tape resources are freed up and a storage pool copy occurs to tape volumes that are to be taken offsite.
The backups are completed before the offsite tapes are copied (healthy).
Once this Storage Pool Copy has occurred the TSM database backup can run as it will now know what offsite volumes contain the latest backup copies (good practice).
The TSM DB Backup occurs when the key processes have finished in this cycle (healthy).
During a period of low activity the expiration process runs, looking back over the previous week (Figure 2) the user can see that the reclamation process took place over the previous weekend at a time of low backup activity and low restore potential (healthy). This is important due to the high tape mount requirements of the process.
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Figure 2. TSM Server Processes schedule – over a week
Benefit DPA aligns the multitude of interrelated TSM admin processes in an intuitive graphical manner that enables inefficient irregularities in the daily cycle to be readily identified and addressed.
TSM Storage Pool Utilization The Storage Pool Utilization report is useful to view in conjunction with the Server Processes report. TSM disk pools typically migrate to tape periodically. As governed by high and low migration watermarks these migrations can impact performance if, for instance, they occur at times of backup activity.
The two horizontal lines on this graph represent the high watermarks of the pools in question and it can be seen that the migration is duly triggered when the pool hits the preconfigured threshold.
DPA provides an intuitive graphical representation of storage pool utilization from which the user can readily identify inefficient practices and configurations.
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Figure 3. TSM Storage Pool Utilization – for the last week
TSM Analyses The rich function of DPA goes further than merely reporting. Its Proactive Analysis Engine (PAE) is an advanced analysis system and inference engine designed to look for correlations, connections, and trends within the datamine and draw conclusions that are useful to application administrators. When the PAE finds a condition on which it has been programmed to alert, it automatically logs the information back to the datamine. The PAE can also send the alert to other systems defined by the user through mechanisms such as SNMP and e-mail.
The user can configure and customize analyses that are topical to their environment. The following figure shows examples of standard TSM analyses that are preconfigured with DPA.
Figure 4. TSM analysis rules list
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TSM Database (DB) In the “How does TSM work?” section we mentioned the TSM database, which stores environmental metadata, policy specification, and client detail — effectively the entire system status and history. It can be visualized as a sort of “Super Catalog” and backups of it are taken at least daily and treated as disaster recovery media.
DPA allows the user to closely monitor the key TSM database and its interaction with the environment from a number of perspectives.
From the Server Processes report we now know that the administrative processes are running in a healthy daily cycle. More detail is available in the TSM DB Backups report.
TSM Database Backups This report shows the backup status and target volume of the crucial TSM database backups. This report could be e-mailed to the DR team in order to ensure the correct offsite volumes are returned in the event of a recovery situation. Alerts can be sent to key personnel if these backups fail.
Figure 5. TSM Database Backups – for the last week
Benefit DPA can ensure that an independent track of crucial recovery media is maintained and e-mailed to key personnel.
TSM Database Volume Status Remember that this database is the underlying TSM database that holds key information about the whole environment. Now that we know that the DB backup media is documented, we can take some time to ensure the DB volumes and copies are synchronized and protected against disk failure. In the following figure we can see the constituent volume names, size, free space, and copy status.
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Figure 6. TSM Database Volume Status – current
Benefit DPA maintains an independent record of TSM DB volume information and status and displays access rights of TSM volumes
TSM Database Utilization
Predicting TSM DB and recovery log utilization The TSM DB and recovery log are key components of TSM and serious data loss can result if they are compromised. Running out of available capacity would be a serious issue. It is always important to keep an eye on DB and recovery log utilization, and DPA provides an excellent graphical reporting format. It can be seen for both of the TSM “Danube” servers and “Forth” that the recovery logs have not been at risk of running out of space and the DB utilization has been quite constant. By analyzing historical data DPA can provide a best-fit trend, extrapolating into the future to indicate when capacity will approach 100% and enabling the user to proactively add resources where necessary.
Benefit DPA reports DB and recovery log utilization in intuitive graphical format.
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Figure 7. TSM Database Utilization – for a one-week period
TSM Database Usage We have seen that DPA allows the user to closely monitor the various TSM schedules, volume constitution, and percent utilization of the DB, but what about its maximum size?
TSM DB maximum or “unmanageable” size is a subject of great debate. We can see from the report, in Figure 8, that one of the Danube servers has a 90 GB database. This database size might be cause for concern.
When TSM can no longer “expire” database entries as quickly as they are being added, you are over the database size limit. If expiration takes longer than the time window allowed for it in your daily schedule you have probably exceeded your hardware configuration's maximum size and should consider splitting the server.
We can investigate the expiration process in the next section.
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Figure 8. TSM Database Usage in GB – current
Benefit The user can readily identify departures from best practice across the enterprise and investigate
TSM Expirations We have seen from the TSM Database Usage report that the efficiency of our expiration processes could be key to establishing if we are approaching an unmanageably large TSM database. The expirations all seem to be successful and not particularly long running.
Figure 9. TSM Expirations – for the last week It would be useful to compare the expiration run time with historical data from Forth. We can best achieve this by returning to the TSM Server Processes report that we ran earlier and lengthening the window.
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There seems to have been a slight increase in the number of longer expiration processes that have run. The duration of the expiration processes can be shown by hovering over each instance in the report below. This will show a box with the details for each expiration process. If the expiration were growing more drastically, it might be wise to have these reports scheduled daily and assign an analysis to look for long-running expirations.
This server should be monitored closely and considered as a potential candidate for load-balancing operations.
Figure 10. TSM Server Processes – for one week
Benefit DPA goes beyond success/failure reporting and provides intelligent insight into the health and function of the TSM server and DB
TSM Migration Summary It is important that migrations occur as scheduled in order so that the flow of data from pool to pool is maintained and sufficient resources are available to allow successful TSM backups. In addition to the candle chart style of TSM Migration reporting a tabular drill-down presentation is also available. Once more we have an easily readable summary through which we can readily drill down to the underlying detail, by left-clicking on the cell in question.
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Figure 11. TSM Migration Summary – for the last month
And once we have the tabular detail, right-click on an error to view the associated errors.
Figure 12. TSM Failed Migration jobs – for one month
Figure 13. TSM Migration Errors details
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Benefit It is not just the backups that are important. DPA applies equal weight to the migrations and provides a drill down to aid problem identification
TSM tape media reporting Administrators of traditional backup applications are naturally aware of tape age and the number of mounts that sets of tapes have undergone. This is due to the predictable cycle of full and incremental backups over time and the sets of tapes that correspond with them. For TSM administrators much of the tape rotation is handled for them so volume age is not so apparent. DPA allows detailed reporting of volumes including age, number of mounts, and now the number of read and write errors. This allows administrators to tightly manage their tapes.
Figure 14. TSM Used Media
Benefit DPA can now report on read write errors by volume allowing the user to sort by error count to prioritize and direct remedial action accordingly.
TSM Reclamation Summary Reclamation processing in TSM is important in minimizing the number of physical tapes that are in use, saving costs and ensuring tapes are available for reuse to satisfy backup requirements. Reclamation reporting can view activity from a high-level summary perspective, allowing the user to drill into underlying detailed reports if required.
Figure 15. TSM Reclamation Summary processes – for last week
A more detailed reclamation report is as follows:
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Figure 16. TSM Reclamation Jobs – for last week The TSM Media Reclamation Distribution report displays details on the potentially reclaimable volumes in the estate at a glance, allowing the user to predict how many volumes might be freed up by a change in reclamation policy.
Figure 17. TSM Media Reclamation Distribution – for last month
Benefit DPA provides a range of reclamation reports from a high-level summary down to individual volume detail, showing percent reclaimable and the reclamation threshold of the associated group.
A reclamation rule set can analyze the reclamation detail data and generate alerts if volumes in a pool are predicted to pass the reclamation threshold
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TSM Media Report (Scratch Pool Prediction) As tapes rotate through the backup cycle they eventually are reclaimed and returned to a scratch pool from which they can be drawn to satisfy new mounts and rejoin the cycle. It is important that scratch volume levels are closely monitored or crucial mounts will fail.
The Media Count Daily report is useful for reporting and trending of individual pool utilization that can be applied to scratch pools, for instance, to gain advance warning of scratch tape shortages.
By taking a count of the number of backup tapes available and extrapolating the information on both the number of tapes used by the backup server and the number of tapes added to the library, an accurate forecast can be made of when new tapes will be required. This allows a backup system administrator to be confident that they have enough tapes to continue to carry out operational backups, and for purchasing departments to order tapes only when required. This can result in significant operational expenditure savings.
When plotting data that has linear trending characteristics, if the end time of the report is specified to be some point in the future, then the application automatically extends the data series to show what is expected at some time in the future. These trend lines are displayed using a dotted line.
The resulting report shown below is a very useful indicator of scratch availability and it can be seen that neither pool has dipped below 10 volumes over the last week.
Figure 18. TSM Media Count Daily – for one week
DPA helps the user take this further though by extrapolating into the future to see what the utilization is likely to be if the current growth trend of available tapes continues.
In Figure 19, DPA has calculated a best-fit prediction of the scratch tape utilization that suggests that the TSM Danube server will likely be freeing up numerous tapes if current trends continue. These could be allocated to Forth, eliminating the need to purchase additional tapes.
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Figure 19. TSM daily scratch media projections – over two weeks
Benefit DPA provides confidence in the knowledge that there are enough tapes to continue to carry out operational backups, allowing purchasing departments to order tapes only when required. This can result in significant operational expenditure savings
TSM day-to-day data protection reporting The ability to summarize large amounts of data quickly is a key part of effective backup reporting. DPA provides excellent reports for all leading backup applications, including TSM. DPA provides TSM backup status by client and job in formats that allow a high-level view that can be “drilled into” to provide topical detail if required. This paper will not dwell too much on the more generic DPA function but will focus on the TSM-specific function that DPA provides.
Client Summary The Client Summary gives an excellent at-a-glance overview of the backup activity from the client perspective for last night’s backup. The user can click on a cell of interest to drill into the detail.
Figure 20. TSM Client Summary – for last night’s backup
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Benefit DPA can report on TSM backup activity from the client and job perspectives.
Report Card Another useful daily check is the backup Report Card, which provides backup status information from the perspective of the backup client in an easily readable red/green traffic light style. Green cells indicate success, red cells indicate failure, red and green cells indicate partial success/failure, and a white cell indicates that no backup activity took place. By running the report over a time window the user can also get an “at a glance” view of the recent history of the client on a daily basis.
If required the user can click on a cell of interest to drill down to the detail for that backup.
Figure 21. TSM Report Card – for last week
Benefit The Report Card allows the user to quickly look at a large number of clients over time. Its visual nature allows users to readily pinpoint specific issues easily missed, such as recurrent failures of the same backup client.
Backup Save Set Summary The user can also look at backup status from the point of view of the save set or job with the same drill-down capabilities. Multiple reports can be incorporated into one overview (or dashboard) to provide a useful single view of multiple aspects of backup operations.
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Figure 22. TSM Backup Save Set dashboard – for last night
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Backup Clients Not Backed Up By providing a list of clients that have not backed up over a period of time the backup system administrator remains continually aware of these clients and can follow up regularly with the backup client administrators.
Figure 23. TSM Backup Clients Not Backed Up – for last week
Benefit DPA provides a list of clients that have not backed up over a period of time. The backup system administrator can then ensure that intentional short-term suspensions from backup do not become an unintentional permanent absence.
Strike Report The Strike Report provides a useful perspective in that it concisely presents the number of clients that have failed once, twice, and three times in a row over the selected time window. The user can then choose to drill down to identify the clients and the details of the individual failures.
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Figure 24. TSM Strike Summary – for last month
Benefit The user can rapidly identify the most exposed clients and drill down to the underlying detail of the failures.
Conclusion Due to the unique structure of its architecture, TSM can be a robust solution but only if it is constantly maintained and monitored. EMC Data Protection Advisor provides the tools to monitor, alert, and report across your TSM environment, in addition to any other backup applications in your environment. DPA provides increased visibility while reducing effort, increases availability by making you proactive in managing your data protection infrastructure, and helps to drive down cost of operations.
For customers that have EMC replication or NAS solutions, look for similar capabilities through DPA applied to those critical pieces of your infrastructure.
References The following can provide additional information and can be found on Powerlink®, EMC’s password-protected customer- and partner-only extranet.
• EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Architecture Overview • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Compatibility Matrix • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Installation Guide • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Administration Guide • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Reference Guide • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 Release Notes • EMC Data Protection Advisor Version 5.5 User Guide
Appendix: Glossary A full TSM glossary is outside of the scope of this paper but here are a few useful terms and definitions. Active policy set The policy set within a policy domain that contains the most recently activated policy. This policy set is used by all client nodes that are assigned to the current policy domain.
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Active version The most recent backup copy of a file that is stored in TSM storage for a file that currently exists on a file server or workstation. An active version remains active and exempt from deletion until it is replaced by a new backup version, or Tivoli Storage Manager detects, during an incremental backup, that the user has deleted the original file from a file server or workstation.
Device class The configuration object that represents the type of storage device that can use the volumes defined to a given storage pool. The storage pool - device class – hardware association is key to TSM software-to-hardware mapping.
For example, an 8 mm tape device class can be used to associate a storage pool with any library device that handles 8 mm tape.
Each removable media-type device class is associated with a single library. Expiration Expiration is the process in which files are identified for deletion because their expiration date or retention period has passed. Backed-up or archived files are marked for deletion based on the criteria that are defined in the backup or archive copy group.
File space A file space is a logical space on the TSM server that contains a group of files. In Tivoli Storage Manager, users can restore, retrieve, or delete file spaces from Tivoli Storage Manager storage.
Incremental forever backup (progressive) The “incremental forever” or “progressive” paradigm dispenses with the more traditional full, partial/differential weekly cycle that underpins more conventional backup applications. Progressive backup requires only one “full” backup followed by incremental backups.
Utilizing its own DB, TSM keeps a record of those client files that have changed and the latest versions of files and only backs up files that have changed since the last incremental backup.
Storage pool A storage pool is a named set of storage volumes that are used as the destination of backup or archive copies. Tivoli Storage Manager A client-server licensed program product that provides storage management and data access services to customers in a multivendor computer environment.
Policy objects and examples
Copy group (key) The working elements of TSM policy are defined in copy groups. These elements include the number of versions of TSM client files to be maintained and the amount of time those files will be stored. The other TSM data management policy objects are primarily used to provide implementation flexibility. There are two kinds of copy groups: backup and archive.
For example, within the default management class created to handle general data for the Windows policy domain, one might set up a backup copy group that maintains three copies of existing data and stores those copies for 100 days.
Management Class (key) A policy object that can be configured to map to different categories of data generated by TSM client nodes.
A management class contains one backup copy group, one archive copy group, or one of each. One management class in a policy set must be designated as the default. Additional management classes can be created and specified for use by individual TSM clients.
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For example, within the active policy set for the domain created for UNIX machines, one might set up one management class for general data (default) and one for directory structure information.
The management class and underlying copy groups are key policy objects in all TSM policy implementations.
Policy domain A policy domain is a policy object that can be configured to map to different categories of TSM clients within an organization.
For example, you might set up different policy domains for UNIX-based file server machines and Windows-based workstations. These domains could be used to provide customized storage management and demarcate administrative control for each logical group.
Policy set A policy set is a policy object that can be configured to create subsets of TSM client nodes within a domain.
However, only one policy set can be active within a given policy domain at any time. Because of this restriction, most administrators implement just one policy set and focus their management effort on policy domains, management classes, and copy groups, making the policy set largely vestigial.
Retention Retention is specified within backup and archive copy groups and dictates the amount of time, in days, that inactive backed-up or archived files are retained in the storage pool before they are deleted. The following copy group attributes define retention: retain extra versions, retain only version, retain version.
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