In the past few years, the speed of backup & restore has made it to most of the large enterprise CEO “to achieve” list. The problem is raising up as the amount of the data is growing exponentially, where the backup window is shrinking. Its no longer acceptable to take a database down for backup or even keep it in backup mode for few hours. The restore time is even getting more critical. Its no longer acceptable to require few hours to restore a 1TB database or an e-mail. Few hours database downtime in a financial firm can mean a loss in millions of dollars, I am not sure how would the IT department make up for that. Will they be able to get back to their desk next morning?…

Many of you who had figured out that I was away of writing on my blog for a while, I will have to tell you IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager is the reason behind it. This product which is a bit more than two weeks old, is going to replace IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Copy Services & IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for advanced Copy Services. I have been lucky to start testing the product about three weeks back even before it went GA, as we had to build a proof of concept for one of our large clients for Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for SQL on DS8000.

You might wonder what is IBM TFCM is all about. Its easier to understand the idea behind it if you have a bit of background of storage snapshotting technology.…