Tidal™ Enterprise Adapter for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)

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IBM TSM protects your organization’s data from failures and other errors by storing backup, archive, space management and bare-metal restore data, as well as compliance and disaster-recovery data. While the internal scheduler in TSM does an adequate job of managing its own processes, it is not optimized for all enterprise scheduling requirements. A significant limitation includes managing dependencies across multiple applications and platforms—critical to streamlining operations. Custom-made by Tidal Consulting Services for the unique needs of any organization, the Tidal Enterprise Adapter™ for TSM is the interface between Tidal Enterprise Scheduler™ and TSM. Together, they provide organizations with robust scheduling functionality including cross-platform, cross-application dependency support, real-time interaction and centralized control.

Bring It All Under One Roof
With the Enterprise Adapter for TSM, Tidal Software provides a consolidated, enterprise-wide scheduling solution for your corporate datacenter that includes your back-up technology. Instead of multiple applications and machines with their own schedulers or scripts, the Enterprise Adapter for TSM brings all scheduling jobs under one umbrella. With the addition of Tidal Enterprise Scheduler to your TSM infrastructure, you can manage your backup schedules and maintain a centralized level of control over your data protection needs.

Key Benefits

• Leverages existing technology and expand TSM investments to create a complete enterprise solution
• Consolidates Tivoli application automation under one corporate-wide console with one staff and one set of internal procedures
• Reduces training and operational support to one application automation environment
• Provides richer, more advanced scheduling features than the native Tivoli job scheduler for greater efficiency and productivity

Key Features

• View and interact with TSM processes in real-time
• Schedule a single occurrence or recurring process within TSM
• Set a dependency between a TSM process and a process running on another operating system such as UNIX®, Windows® NT/2000, Linux®, z/OS® and MPE/iX®
• Set a dependency between a TSM process and a process running in another application such as SAP® R/3, PeopleSoft® and Oracle® E-Business Suite
• Schedule a TSM process based on multiple types of business calendars
• View the TSM flow graphically
• Display and manage TSM output from a central console
• Ability to view reports and alert personnel based on various TSM job statuses
• Create custom variables for ease of job creation and maintenance
• Monitor any files that are used as events to trigger a TSM process
• Manage queues for all TSM processes
• Centralize security administration for all TSM processes
• Capture additional logging information on TSM jobs
• Schedules TSM backups as incremental and selective [files that you specify]
• Scheduling of backup processes on specific hosts or group of hosts
• TSM job results can be based on validation criteria

How It Works
The Tidal integration for TSM requires you to only install the Tidal bridge once on the TSM server and then roll out the schedules to the individual clients you wish to schedule the backups on. The internal policies, schedules and host information defined within TSM are used to identify the specifics of each backup request initiated from Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. Upon submission of each backup request, Tidal Software monitors the execution of each request and continuously updates users with real-time status information.

The Enterprise Adapter enforces the existing security policies, user names and passwords that control the TSM jobs. The logging information produced during and after the TSM job is available for display or file printing from within Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. Tidal Software can now monitor and manage all TSM requests and provide centralized scheduling control over every TSM server on the enterprise.

The Enterprise Adapter allows you to centrally manage TSM processing from a single point-of-control. With this technology, a scheduled backup can execute based on the completion status of other jobs running on any platform or applications supported by Tidal Software. For example, users can ensure that the right data will be correctly backed up once a critical UNIX or SAP process has completed. Current Tidal Enterprise Scheduler customers can leverage existing TSM data backup processes by incorporating them into a true enterprise-wide scheduling solution and managing them from a single console. Additionally, the TSM application can share data with all the other strategic systems and applications in your environment.

Job Real-Time Status and Work Flow
Tidal's bridge is event based using asynchronous callbacks for status monitoring, so status changes are known as soon as they occur (in real-time). This helps reduce production processing time windows, because Tidal does not have to wait for a polling interval to pass before reacting to the completion of a job.

Because the functionality is built in as a programmatic bridge to the Tidal Agent, it is better able to communicate log and status information in real time to the Tidal console than can be achieved.

Password Encryption
The password encryption feature will allow you to enter an encrypted password in the environment file instead of the raw password for protection. The encrypted password will only be decrypted during runtime of the TSM jobs by Tidal.

Environment Files
By creating environment file(s) for commonly used values that can be reused by many jobs, you can minimize the number of parameters that need to be entered in each of the TSM jobs.

Custom Variable
Create custom Tidal variables for information that is repeated or is common when defining jobs. Using custom variables greatly enhances job creation efficiency and job maintenance.

System Backups
UNIX, Windows File System, Oracle (UNIX), Oracle (Windows), SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange