Systems Management

Systems management can provide better control of business operational and administrative costs through a holistic view of your infrastructure, tracking and monitoring assets, connections and dependencies. IT administrators can offer automation to solve simple problems quickly and alert experts when needed. Also, keep track of assets, predict and prevent problems, identify and solve minor issues quickly, and recover from major problems effectively.

Linux on System z provides a dynamic infrastructure, and Backup consolidation and patch management & software distribution are only two examples of its enterprise-wide systems management capabilities.

Backup Consolidation

Patch & software distribution

Linux on System z is a very attractive platform to provide central backup services.
		The major advantages of central backup services can be: The standardization of the backup operation The reduction of backup and restore times The reduction of costs for the IT infrastructure

In support of these advantages are the standardization of the backup software and a dedicated backup network, helping to improve business continuity and availability and to enhance the user productivity.

Linux on System z is particularly suitable for central backup services, because the specific attributes of the hardware and virtualization technologies.

One of the many IBM System z hardware strengths is its optimized design for I/O intensive applications, and since backup & restore is one of the most I/O intensive workload in a data center, the IBM System z servers are predestined for this workload.

The z/VM virtualization technology can virtualize all hardware resources and enable a very flexible resource sharing of processors, memory and the network among the Linux systems. Other strengths of the z/VM technology are its provisioning capabilities of additional Linux systems, and the ensured isolation of the server and the network - both important strengths when running multiple backup servers, and balancing the backup workload with the other workload jobs.

Linux can leverage the advantages of the System z servers and virtualization technologies, and can run the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is IBM’s premier solution for backup. TSM itself simplifies backup by various means. Its policy sets and management classes combined with include-exclude lists and schedules allow a highly automation even in heterogeneous environments which comprise hundreds or thousands of clients. Furthermore, administrative schedules automate the management of the TSM storage pools, e.g. creating copies of backup data, moving backup data from primary backup storage (disk) to secondary backup storage (tape), the movement of tapes to a vaulting location, and the deletion of old backups. This automation takes the pressure off the system administrator and improves the risk prevention. More and detailed information can be found at the Tivoli Storage Manager Web page.

Consolidation of backup servers
The enormous capabilities of the Linux on System z environment allow hosting a large TSM server farm on a single System z server, while the mainframe economics reduces complexity and costs of operation. The mainframe’s energy efficiency saves space and reduces costs for power and facilities. A respective scheduling allows to flatten peak workload and thus to optimize the utilization of the available hardware resources. z/VM offers efficient management capabilities and the flexibility to add new TSM servers as needed. Capacity on demand allows to increase/decrease the processing power of the System z server quickly, for instance, to provide the resources for restoring several large application servers after a major disaster. Resources like LAN, disk storage and tape devices must be connected just to a single physical System z server.

Finally, Linux on System z provides a cost-effective and dynamic infrastructure for TSM to consolidate a heterogeneous backup landscape.

Consolidated Backup Management with Linux on System z (113KB)

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Tivoli Storage Manager Server - Hardware and Software requirements by version

	Tivoli Storage Manager Version 6.1 Consolidated Backup Management with Linux on System z
	Tivoli Storage Manager Version 5.5
	Tivoli Storage Manager Version 5.4

Tivoli Storage Manager Version 6.1 Consolidated Backup Management with Linux on System z (Announcement letter)

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Tivoli Storage Manager Version 5.5

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Tivoli Storage Manager Version 5.4

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The Tivoli Storage Manager Client hardware and software requirements are available at: Supported platforms