IBM 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 reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

This product is part of the IBM TotalStorage suite of products and is unrelated to the Tivoli Management Framework.

History

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 an 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).