IBM has extended Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP); a data protection and availability product for virtual environments.
In hybrid clouds, enterprises can deploy IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on premises to manage AWS EC2 EBS snapshots’ Alternatively, they can deploy IBM Spectrum Protect Plus on AWS for the “all-in-the-cloud experience”. Enhanced AWS workload support includes EC2 instances, VMware virtual machines, databases, and Microsoft Exchange.
There is better protection for containers. Developers can set policies to schedule Kubernetes persistent volume snapshots, replication to secondary sites and copying data to object storage or IBM Spectrum Protect for secure long-term data retention.
Developers can back up and recover logical persistent volume groupings using Kubernetes labels. IBM said this capability is key; as applications built using containers are actually logical groups of multiple components. For example, an application may have a Mongo DB container, a web service container and middleware containers. If these application components share a common label, users can use the Kubernetes label feature to select the logical application grouping instead of picking individual volumes (persistent volumes) that make up the application.
Logical persistent volumes associated with Kubernetes namespaces can be backed up and recovered by developers.
Users can now back up, recover, reuse, and retain data in Windows file systems, with Spectrum Protect Plus agentless technology, including file-level backup and recovery of file systems on physical or virtualized servers.
Spectrum Protect
IBM continues to sell Spectrum Protect, which is a modern incarnation of the old Tivoli product,. The software backs up physical and virtual servers and in the public cloud. The latest release includes retention set to tape.
Spectrum Protect also enables users to back up the Spectrum Protect database directly to object storage including IBM Cloud Object Storage, AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, and other supported S3 targets.
There is a new licensing option for the Spectrum Protect Suite: the Committed Term License. These can be bought for a minimum of 12-months and up to a five-year term. IBM says the new pricing provides a lower-entry cost option, a flat price per TB, and increased flexibility with no vendor lock-in..
A new release of IBM’s Spectrum Copy Data Management’s lets users improve SAP HANA point in time (PIT) recovery with native log backups. Prior to this release, users could recover data using hourly snapshots. Log support enables much more gtranular recoveries.