Michael Allen Kaczmarski

Beyond backup toward storage management

The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, a client/server product providing backup, archive, and space management functions in heterogeneous distributed environments, performs extensive storage management after client data have reached the server. Beyond minimizing the amount of data that a client needs to send on successive backup operations, Tivoli Storage Manager optimizes data placement for disaster recovery, for restore operations, and for fault tolerant access. It also adapts to changes in device technology. The original design points of the product in research have been expanded to provide a comprehensive set of functions that not only facilitate backup but also support content managers and deep storage applications. The design points and functions are described in this paper.

Archive storage system design for long-term storage of massive amounts of data

A dramatic shift is underway in how organizations use computer storage. This shift will have a profound impact on storage system design. The requirement for storage of traditional transactional data is being supplemented by the necessity to store information for long periods. In 2005, a total of 2,700 petabytes of storage was allocated worldwide for information that required long-term retention, and this amount is expected to grow to an estimated 27,200 petabytes by 2010. In this paper, we review the requirements for long-term storage of data and describe an innovative approach for developing a highly scalable and flexible archive storage system using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Such a system is expected to be capable of preserving data for decades, providing efficient policy-based management of the data, and allowing efficient search and access to data regardless of data content or location.