December 2015: Introducing IBM Spectrum Protect v7.1.4

VMware Virtual Volume (VVOL) Support: Unlocking improved resource utilization
VMware Virtual Environments leveraging VVOLs can reduce costs by improving resource utilization, simplifying operational tasks and allowing for more granular fulfillment of service-level agreements. The VVOL support of IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments enables customers to take advantage of this new technology while providing enterprise class data protection.

Support for VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) sizes increased from 2 to 8 TB: Unlocking simplified administration
Lowering management costs by simplifying the administration of VMware Virtual Environments can be achieved by managing a small number of large VMDKs rather than a big number of small VMDKs. The increased maximum size of 8 TB of IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments enables customers to leverage this technology while providing enterprise class data protection.

Dynamic Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Restore: Increasing storage administrators productivity
Administrators can now run fully automated Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox restore operations from full VMware Virtual Machine level backups, even if the Exchange databases were moved or deleted. This function eliminates manual steps for mailbox restore operations of moved or deleted databases by increasing administrators productivity to lower administration costs.

New IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center Enhancements features: Reducing administration costs
The new customizable reporting feature in the Operations Center simplifies administration by creating automated scheduled reports that are tailored to generate and email any statistic that administrators can write SQL statements for. Furthermore, administrators using NAS filers can view much more detailed information about full and differential backup schedules and per volume backup sizes. Both features reduce IBM Spectrum Protect administration costs by simplifying operational tasks.

Enhanced support for clustered NetApp Storage Arrays running DATA ONTAP: Enabling lower NetApp management costs
NetApp has introduced Cluster-Mode (CDOT) in their DATA ONTAP operating system version 8 to allow for increased capacity and performance scaling to lower costs for managing large NetApp environments. In addition to previously announced “snapshot difference incremental backup” – based data protection, IBM Spectrum Protect now expands NDMP and Snap-Mirror-to-Tape based data protection for clustered NetApp storage arrays. This allows customers to unlock potential cost savings of NetAPP Cluster-Mode, while continuing to use IBM Spectrum Protect proven Data Protection. Performance improvements were also made by increasing the tape-block size from 64K to 256K.

New IBM Spectrum Protect Blueprint for Linux on Power: Accelerating Time-to-Value
IBM Spectrum Protect Blueprints consist of documents, or “cookbooks”, that describe detailed reference architectures to optimize performance as well as include scripts to speed up installation and configuration. This new Blueprint describes a reference architecture for IBM Spectrum Protect running Linux on Power by accelerating time-to-value for Linux on Power systems to reduce Total Cost of Administration.