Tivoli Storage Manager

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family.

It enables backups and recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

This product is part of the IBM Spectrum Software Defined Storage suite of products and is unrelated to the Tivoli Management Framework.

TSM descended from a project done at IBM's Almaden Research Center around 1988 to back up VM/CMS systems. The first product that emerged was Workstation Data Save Facility (WDSF). WDSF's original purpose was to back up PC/DOS, OS/2, and AIX workstation data onto a VM/CMS (and later MVS) server. WDSF morphed into ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) and was re-branded Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999.

The TSM database (through release 5.5) was a bespoke B+ tree database; although the TSM database uses many of the same underlying technologies as IBM's DB2, has a SQL engine (for read-only use), and supports access through ODBC, the database has an architectural limit of approximately 530 GB, and 13 GB of log space. Starting with TSM 6.1, released in May 2009, TSM uses a DB2 instance as its database (thus eliminating the architectural limitations of the previous TSM database).

TSM maintains a relational database (limit 534GB through TSM v5.5, 4TB with TSM v6.3.3+) and recovery log (aka transaction log, limit 13 GB through TSM v5.5, 128GB with TSM v6.1+) for logging, configuration, statistical information, and object metadata. v5.5 DB pages are always 4KB, and partitions every 4MB. Single row inserts only. On average, 20GB of space is consumed for every 25 million objects. Shallow directory structures use less TSM DB space than deeper paths. This database may generally be queried via an emulated SQL-98 compliant interface, or through undocumented SHOW, CREATE or DELETE commands.

Actual user data is managed via a cascading hierarchy of storage media (Primary Storage Pools) presented as raw devices (UNIX), filesystem containers (Windows and Linux), streaming tape or optical media. Additionally, emulated tape from a Virtual Tape Library or EMC Centera WORM archival device is supported. Duplicate copies (Backupsets or Copy Storage Pools) of any subset of data may be created on sequential media for redundancy or off-site management.

The 5.5 release of the TSM Server is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, Windows Server, and z/OS. The TSM Client of the same release is supported on NetWare, macOS, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, z/OS, Solaris, and Windows 32/64-bit. The 6.1 release of the TSM Server is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows Server, while the TSM Client is supported on the same operating systems as 5.5. On October 21, 2011, TSM 6.3 was released.