In today’s business world, where application servers are operational 24 hours a day, the data on these servers must be fully protected. You can’t afford to lose any data, but you also can’t afford to stop these critical systems for hours so you can protect the data adequately.As the amount of data that needs protecting continues to grow exponentially and the need to keep the downtime associated with backup to an absolute minimum, IT processes are at their breaking point.

Data volume snapshot technologies, such as IBM FlashCopy®, can help minimize the impact caused by backups and provide near instant restore capabilities. Many storage systems are now equipped with volume snapshot tools, however these hardware-based snap-shot technologies provide only “crash-consistent” copies of data. Many business-critical applications, including those that rely on a relational database, need an additional snapshot process to ensure that all parts of a data transaction are flushed from memory and committed to disk prior to the snapshot to ensure you have a usable, consistent copy of the data.

IBM Tivoli®Storage FlashCopy Manager can help deliver the highest levels of protection for mission critical IBM DB2®, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server applications via integrated application-aware snapshot backup and restore capabilities. This is achieved through the exploitation of advanced IBM storage hardware snapshot technology to create a high performance, low impact application data protection solution.

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager is an easy to install, configure and deploy package that seamlessly integrates with IBM System Storage^TM DS8000®, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller and IBM XIV® Storage System products. For Microsoft Windows® environments, Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager also supports other Microsoft VolumeShadow Copy Services (VSS)-capable hardware such as IBM System Storage DS3000, DS4000®, and DS5000. The snapshots captured by Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager can be retained as backups on local disk, and with optional integration with TivoliStorage Manager, customers can leverage the full range of advanced data protection and data reduction capabilities such as data deduplication, progressive incremental backup, hierarchical storage management and centrally managed policy based administration.

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