Enhancements in the Operations Center
Now, the Operations Center utilizes wizards to simply connect to IBM Bluemix IBM Cloud Object Storage via Swift or S3. In addition you can now sort and filter activity log entries when you are troubleshooting server tasks. On the details page for a server, you can view server messages for tasks on the Active Tasks and Completed Tasks tabs. The activity log pane shows the server messages that are associated with the selected task. The activity log contains messages that are normally sent to the server console during server operation. In previous releases, the activity log entries for server tasks were displayed in a list. You could review the list to diagnose problems, and you could search the activity log by using the browser’s search function. To export the activity log information, you could use the browser’s copy function and paste the information into a file. Now, the activity log for server tasks displays the server messages in the same table format that is used throughout the Operations Center. You can now sort and filer the activity log entries in the same way you sort and filter the information for clients, servers, storage pools, and so on. You can now sort messages by date/time or status, and you can filter by date/time, status, or message. Like the other tables in the Operations Center, you can now export the data in the activity log pane as a comma-separated values (CSV) file.
Updates to IBM Spectrum Protect Blueprints
For small systems, use SSD drives to process a larger daily workload. Hardware requirements are updated for small-scale systems, which now use four 400 GB solid-state disk (SSD) drives for the database. The SSD drives replace the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) database disks that were used in the previous release. With this update, a small system can process a daily workload of up to 10 TB. In the previous release, the maximum daily workload was 6 TB. For large systems, use Storwize® V5030 second-generation hardware with distributed arrays to lower costs and improve efficiency. Hardware requirements are updated for large-scale IBM Storwize systems, which now use Storwize V5030 second-generation hardware with distributed arrays.
This updated hardware configuration provides two main benefits:
1. You can implement a lower-cost solution by using Storwize V5030 second-generation hardware, as compared to using Storwize V7000 hardware, which was supported in the previous blueprint configuration.
2. If you use Storwize V5030 second-generation hardware and nearline SAS (NL-SAS) drives, you can take advantage of faster rebuild times in case of a disk failure. Storwize distributed arrays, which can contain 4 – 128 drives, also contain rebuild areas that are used to maintain redundancy after a drive fails. The distributed configuration can reduce rebuild times and decrease the exposure of volumes to the extra workload of recovering redundancy.
The database size for large systems is increased to 6 TB to better align database size with storage pool size, following the introduction of data compression in storage pools. With data compression, you can protect more data in the same amount of storage pool disk space; the more data you store, the more database capacity you require. To accommodate larger databases, configuration improvements were introduced, including an increased number of concurrent database backup streams. The improvements are designed to optimize backup and restore operations for databases.
Granular privileges for VMware Self Service File Restore
The Data Protection for VMware client includes a self-service file restore feature, which is configured with the Data Protection for VMware Configuration Wizard. It includes a panel for administrator contact information and mount credentials (VM OS permissions) for Windows Restores. It is now documented how users can perform infrastructure mounts as Local Administrator and do not require Domain Administrator privileges. The procedure is supported from IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments v7.1.3 onwards. See the technote with further details:
www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21998066
Additional Platform Support
IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments:
– VMware version 6.5 support
– Link: www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21505139
IBM Spectrum Protect Server v8.1.1 and Clients v8.1.x:
– IBM Spectrum Protect Server v8.1.1 now on the Microsoft Windows Server 2016
– IBM Spectrum Protect Clients v8.1.x. now on Windows 2016
– Link: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21243309
IBM Spectrum Protect for ERP v8.1.1:
– Supports SPS2 for HANA 2.0 on PPC Little Endian and x86
– Cross-platform restores supported, except for PPC Big Endian
– Link: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21219410
S3 Object Storage Verification Program for 3rd Party Devices
Spectrum Protect Cloud Container Storage Pools allow server data to be stored on object storage using the Amazon S3 API and the Swift API. The S3 Devices supported are:
– Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3)
– IBM Cloud Object Storage (On-Premises implementation using S3 API)
– Bluemix Cloud Object Storage S3 API
Vendors can self-validate additional S3 compliant devices for cloud container storage pools as On-premise object storage devices for IBM Spectrum Protect Servers v8.1 or higher. This program is similar to the previous “Ready for Tivoli” program.
The validation process:
– Obtain verification package from IBM
– Review package, which contains documentation, testing instructions, and testing tools.
– Run tests and return output to IBM
– IBM validates testing results
Once validated, your solution will be listed as supported on IBM’s Spectrum Protect support web site.
IBM Spectrum Protect Functions 