Test 000-026: Fundamentals of Applying Tivoli Storage Solutions 2009

Section 1: Planning

1. Given the company organization chart, schedule an introductory meeting with customer sponsor and all interested parties so that a list of key players and decision makers with corresponding roles and responsibilities is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the company organization chart.
2. Find an appropriate meeting room.
3. Schedule a meeting.
4. Compile a list of questions for the interested parties.
5. Identify a list of key players and decision makers with corresponding roles and responsibilities.
6. Create ongoing document of customer interactions and meetings.


2. Given the availability of customer key personnel, describe the storage hardware, networking, operating systems, relational databases, applications, and key vendor environments within the customer organization so that a document which properly describes the customer environment is produced.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the company organization chart.
2. Identify personnel responsible for the storage hardware, networking, operating systems, relational databases, applications, and key vendor environments.
3. Obtain IP network and storage area network (SAN) topology diagrams of key areas.
4. Obtain storage subsystem diagrams.
5. Obtain operating systems, databases and application diagrams or lists.
6. Collate information into a new document that describes the customer environment.
7. Divide the information into relevant business areas.
8. Create subdocuments per business area.


3. Given a customer contact and a description of the IT structure including hardware topology and business organizational information, create a document that represents the organizational structure within the customer environment so that the IT structure, hardware topology, and business organizational information are documented.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the company organization chart.
2. Identify personnel responsible for the storage hardware, networking, operating systems, relational databases, applications, and key vendor environments.
3. Obtain IP network and SAN topology diagrams of key areas.
4. Obtain storage subsystem diagrams.
5. Obtain operating systems, databases and application diagrams or lists.
6. Collate information into a new document that describes the customer environment.


4. Given a list of the customer’s business processes, identify the key areas of the processes that are related to the storage so that the customer’s current business processes (and service level requirements) are documented including any gaps.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's business processes.
2. Convert the processes into business rules.
3. Convert the business rules into storage rules.
4. Compile service level agreements.


5. Given the availability of the information and key persons, document the customer's IT process maturity as it relates to storage so that an overall IT storage process maturity document is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Obtain customer's current process to run book/procedural documentation from key personnel.
2. Review current processes and procedures for completeness.
3. Verify that the processes and procedures are up-to-date for currently deployed software.
4. Recommend and update processes as needed.
5. Verify processes.
6. Create an overall IT storage process maturity document.


6. Given the availability of the information and key persons, document the customer's storage environment baseline so that the customer’s storage environment baseline is documented.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Interview key personnel.
2. Obtain the current storage usage information.
3. Obtain the current server and disk storage system information.
4. Obtain number of locations, local and remote.
5. Verify and document the customer's storage environment baseline.

Section 2: Evaluate the Customer’s IT Processes, Job Roles, and Technologies

1. Given in-house security standards documents, certification requirements, and IBM security standards documents, retrieve existing in-house standards and certification requirements, taking into account relevant international (government or civil) standards so that a document describing relevant security standards and certification requirements are available for the project.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review customer's current in-house security standards.
2. Review customer's standards and certification requirements.
3. Review the international government or civil standards.
4. Create a recommendation document describing relevant security standards and certification requirements as it pertains to storage.


2. Given a list of key decision makers, interview key decision makers and compile the customer’s storage requirements so that a document is created containing the customer’s business and desired storage requirements.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Interview key personnel.
2. Obtain the current storage usage information.
3. Obtain the current server and disk storage system information.
4. Determine customer's data storage trending.
5. Obtain number of locations, local and remote.
6. Document the customer's desired storage environment requirements.


3. Given the customer’s baseline and storage scenarios, analyze business processes from a storage perspective so that a document describing actual data management requirements is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's baseline and storage scenarios.
2. Analyze business processes from a storage perspective.
3. Convert the business processes into business rules.
4. Map the business rules to storage management rules.
5. Create a document describing actual data management requirements.


4. Given the customer’s baseline and storage scenarios, analyze business processes from a storage perspective so that a document describing actual storage hardware requirements is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's baseline and storage scenarios.
2. Analyze business processes from a storage perspective.
3. Convert the business processes into business rules.
4. Map the business rules to storage management rules.
5. Create a document describing actual storage hardware requirements.


5. Given the customer baseline, the data management, and the storage hardware requirement documents, analyze the baseline to identify scenarios so that a document describing the storage scenarios is created to scope the project.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's overall environment baseline, the data management, and the storage hardware requirement documents.
2. Analyze the information to determine the low-end, mid-range, and high-end storage scenarios.
3. Create a document describing storage scenarios.


6. Given the customer’s baseline and storage scenarios, analyze business processes from a storage perspective so that a document describing mutually approved storage requirements is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's overall environment baseline.
2. Review the customer's storage scenarios.
3. Analyze business processes from a storage perspective.
4. Determine the actual storage requirements with the customer approval.
5. Create a document describing the mutually approved storage requirements.


7. Given access to key technical personnel and responses to key questions, assess and evaluate the skill level so that educational opportunities are identified.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Arrange meeting with key technical personnel only.
2. Ask pertinent questions regarding technical skills and knowledge.
3. Analyze information gleaned from interviews.
4. Identify skill gaps.
5. Align skill gaps with educational opportunities.

Section 3: Identify Storage Opportunities

1. Given the customer’s baseline and actual storage requirements, perform an analysis so that a document describing the gaps in the customer’s storage environment is produced.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer's overall environment baseline.
2. Review the mutually approved storage requirements.
3. Perform a gap analysis.
4. Document the gaps in the customer’s storage environment.


2. Given the understanding of the customer’s actual storage requirements, the understanding of IBM Tivoli’s storage offerings, and non-IBM products, match the customer’s storage requirements to IBM Tivoli storage solutions and consolidate it into a single document identifying those opportunities so that a complete customer recommendation for storage hardware and software can be made.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the mutually approved storage requirements.
2. Review IBM Tivoli's storage offerings and related non-IBM products.
3. Map the customer's storage requirements to a recommended storage offering.
4. Document the IBM recommendation for storage hardware and software.


3. Given the understanding of the customer, industry, and IBM Tivoli’s strategies for storage solutions, define a plan for future direction of customer’s storage solutions and consolidate into a single document so that a single document with the customer's storage strategy is created.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the customer, industry, and IBM Tivoli's strategies for storage solutions.
2. Analyze the strategies.
3. Define a plan for the future direction of the customer's storage solution.
4. Consolidate the information into a single document outlining the customer's storage strategy.

Section 4: Create, Justify, and Deliver Solution Design/Recommendation

1. Given the previously generated documents (baseline, evaluation results, and identified storage opportunities), describe the solution’s design comprehensively so that the solution is documented in relation to ITIL standards.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Evaluate the baseline, evaluation results, and identified storage opportunities.
2. Evaluate each scenario as it pertains to.
1. change management
2. problem management
3. compliance
4. risk analysis
5. cost
3. Document the solution as related to ITIL standards.


2. Given a list of IBM products in the solution and results of prior and ongoing interactions with customer personnel, create a document describing recommended education so that recommended education is documented.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the IBM products in the solution.
2. Review the results of interactions with customer personnel.
3. Determine the recommended education.
4. Document recommended education.


3. Given the solution design document and education recommendations, create a project overview document that describes the proposed roadmap so that the interested parties can review it.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Review the solution design document.
2. Review the education recommendations.
3. Create a project overview document that describes the proposed roadmap.


4. Given the customer requirements or goals, current customer technical infrastructure, and the need to propose an IBM solution design, have in-depth knowledge of the core products so that the breadth and depth of the capabilities and reach of the IBM Tivoli portfolio can be explained to the customer.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (Tivoli Storage Manager) - storage management software from IBM Tivoli protects from the risks of data loss and helps reduce complexity, manage costs and address compliance with data retention and availability requirements.
1. Improve business continuity by shortening backup and recovery times and maximizing application availability with advanced data recovery management technologies.
2. Employ data de-duplication and a hierarchy of storage to increase efficiencies and conserve resources.
3. Enhance data security with innovative access and encryption features.
4. Help adapt to changes within the IT infrastructure to minimize service disruptions and speed restorations and backups.
5. Help control storage management costs with ease-of-use features and integration with IBM network-attached storage products.
6. Increase visibility into the data protection environment by providing advanced features for operational monitoring and historical reporting.
7. Create customizable reports in multiple formats such as HTML, Adobe® Portable Document Formatting, and comma-separated values.
2. Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases - allows running primary applications on the database servers while they back up and restore data to and from offline storage with automated tasks, utilities, and interfaces.
1. Protect a wide range of application data by securing the underlying database management systems that hold that data.
2. Exploit the backup-certified utilities and interfaces provided for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Informix.
3. Apply the automated data protection tasks of Tivoli Storage Manager to running database servers.
4. Perform online, consistent, and centralized backups to avoid downtime, protect vital enterprise data infrastructure, and minimize operation costs.
5. Include Data Protection for Informix with centralized, on-line, incremental backup capabilities for restoring and managing Informix server databases and logical logs.
6. Provide Data Protection for Oracle, which interfaces with Oracle Recovery Manager to support Oracle backup and restore utilities.
7. Feature Data Protection for Microsoft SQL Server, which enables users to perform on-line backups of SQL databases to Tivoli Storage Manager storage.
3. Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail - automates data protection, enables "hot" backups without shutting down the server, and improves data restore performance.
1. Use the application program interfaces (APIs) provided by e-mail application vendors to perform online "hot" backups and improve restores without shutting down the e-mail server.
2. Help protect the growing amount of new and changing data that should be securely backed up to help maintain 24x365 application availability.
3. Exploit the "transaction logging" feature of Domino, enabling the capture of just the database changes for logged databases, thus resulting in less-frequent full backups.
4. Use the backup APIs provided by Microsoft to create a copy of the Exchange server storage group databases along with the associated transaction logs.
5. Produce the different types of backups specified by Microsoft Backup APIs: Full Backups, Incremental Backups, Differential Backups, Copy Backups and Database Copy Backups.
6. Data Protection for Microsoft Exchange 2007 on Windows x86_64
4. IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center - designed to provide a basic storage resource management. It extends existing management of a single storage system, and provides capabilities such as storage reporting, monitoring, policy-based management, and storage provisioning.
5. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Basic Edition centralizes management of storage devices that implement the SNIA Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S), which includes the IBM System Storage DS family and IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller. It is designed to help reduce storage management complexity and costs and help improve data availability through open standards (SMI-S). With IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Basic Edition, users can easily upgrade to IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Standard Edition. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Standard Edition provides advanced features such as performance reporting, file-level capacity utilization, best practices-based configuration management, and wizard-driven end-to-end storage provisioning.
1. Automated device discovery
2. Asset and capacity reporting
3. Device configuration
4. Basic storage provisioning
5. Event management
6. Status dashboard
7. Storage topology viewer
6. Tivoli Storage Manager Fastback - gets applications and users backing up and running within minutes following any data loss while performing full data recovery in the background.
1. Protect and recover data for critical Windows applications seamlessly.
2. Reduce the need for traditional backup windows with storage management software that captures data changes at the block level while providing extremely low systems overhead.
3. Schedule automated data transfers based on flexible, policy-based settings, helping administrators meet data protection and retention requirements on a per-application basis.
4. Enable data asset recovery from any Windows application, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2® and Service Access Point (SAP).
5. Make the most effective use of available bandwidth with strategies such as multi-threading, bundling of small files and industry-standard compression.
6. Operating systems supported: Windows


5. Given customer requirements or goals, current customer technical infrastructure and the need to propose an IBM solution design, have familiarity with related IBM Tivoli storage management products as well as storage hardware, so that the breadth and depth of the capabilities and reach of the IBM Tivoli portfolio can be conveyed to client.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services helps protect mission-critical data that requires that 24x7 availability uses advanced copy services to perform the following tasks:
1. Back up Oracle or DB2 databases to a local storage subsystem or a Tivoli Storage Manager server.
2. Restore databases from local storage or Tivoli Storage Manager storage.
2. Tivoli Storage Manager for Copy Services helps back up and restore critical data so that it remains available 24 x 7.
3. Tivoli Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning protects vital SAP system data. Designed to:
1. Handle large volumes of business-critical data and help ensure availability of the application server, with minimal impact on revenue-generating applications.
4. Tivoli Storage Manager for Microsoft SharePoint is a policy-based backup and recovery solution.
1. Quickly and confidently restore Microsoft® SharePoint business data and content after almost any kind of business interruption.
5. Tivoli Storage Manager for Space Management moves inactive data to reclaim online disk space for important active data.
1. Free administrators and users from manual file system pruning tasks, and defer the need to purchase additional disk storage, acting as a Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM).
6. Tivoli Storage Manager for Storage Area Networks works with servers and client computers to make data transfers over storage area network (SAN).
1. Allow SAN-connected Storage Manager servers and Storage Manager client computers to make maximum use of direct network connection to storage.
7. Tivoli Storage Manager for System Backup and Recovery delivers a flexible backup method for your AIX systems.
1. Offer a comprehensive system backup, restore, and reinstallation tool that can be executed from either the AIX command line or by using the System Management Interface Tool menu interface.
8. Tivoli Storage Manager HSM on Windows controls disk storage needs by automatically migrating rarely used files.
1. Move low-activity or inactive files to a hierarchy of lower-cost storage with an efficient storage capacity management solution based on rule-driven migration policies.
9. Tivoli Storage Manager Fastback for Bare Machine Recovery provides recovery following a disaster or catastrophic server failure, restoring systems within an hour.
1. Extensive recovery capabilities for Microsoft Windows servers
10. Tivoli Storage Manager Fastback for Exchange provides users and administrators with the ability to recover Microsoft Exchange data objects quickly and easily.
1. Provide the ability to recover Microsoft Exchange data such as e-mail, attachments, calendar entries, contacts and tasks.
11. IBM Tivoli System Storage SAN Volume Controller is a storage virtualization system that enables a single point of control for storage resources to help support improved business application availability and greater resource utilization. Designed to:
1. Combine storage capacity from multiple disk systems into a reservoir of capacity that can be managed more efficiently.
2. Help increase storage utilization by providing host applications with more flexible access to capacity.
3. Help improve storage administrator productivity by enabling management of heterogeneous storage systems using a common interface.
4. Support improved application availability by insulating host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure.
5. Enable a tiered storage environment in which the cost of storage can be better matched to the value of data.
6. Support advanced copy services from higher- to lower cost devices and across storage systems from multiple vendors.
12. IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files is a continuous backup software that protects your most important files.
1. This real-time, continuous data protection solution for file servers and user endpoints automatically backs up the most critical files the moment they are saved.
13. Differentiate between iSeries, pSeries and xSeries hardware.


6. Given all documents pertaining to the proposed solution, analyze the documentation so that a documented action plan is outlined to mitigate and manage the risk, and any additional resources needed for successful implementation are identified.


With emphasis on performing the following tasks:

1. Identify customer requirements and stated goals.
2. Determine if requirements and goals are technically viable.
3. Determine if proposed software is designed to achieve stated goals.
4. Determine if proposed hardware is correctly sized and meets requirements and goals.
5. Determine if network infrastructure and SAN infrastructure are capable to deliver needed throughput and work loads.
6. Determine if implementation plan has outlined in detail, what will be installed, how it will be installed, who will install it, when it will be installed, and provides instructions on how to back out if something should go wrong.
7. Determine the risks involved both during and after implementation.
8. Determine shortcomings and document if additional resources, software, or hardware are needed.
9. Create document with recommendations to fix identified risks, shortfalls, or items found to be missing from the proposed solution, as well as education for products and hardware.