Big Blue Backs Up SharePoint

IBM has crafted a version of its Tivoli Storage Manager to back up and manage Microsoft SharePoint environments.

The new Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for Microsoft SharePoint provides backup and restore capability for SharePoint online collaboration environments.

IBM notes that Microsoft provides tools to backup SharePoint’s underlying databases, sites and sub-sites, but they lack item-level restore capability, aren’t full fidelity (customers may lose customizations or settings), aren’t integrated with a backup environment that includes tape, and SQL indexes are locked up during backup, limiting backup windows.

Big Blue says it offers SharePoint users item-level restore capability, data integrity, the ability to backup during production hours without locking up SQL indexes, backup environment integration, and policy-based management of backup data, scheduling, monitoring and reporting.

TSM for MS SharePoint also helps customers can the ability to manage data in a hierarchy of tiered storage and offers support for hundreds of devices.

IBM says application-specific backup and recovery offers awareness of the state of the application and can put an application in a consistent state so backup data will be accurate at that point in time.

“All of our application data protection products provide the ability to work with the application to ensure that data is consistent when it is backed up,” the company says.

StorageIO founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz agrees that application-specific backup is a growing necessity.

“It’s not a passing fad and has been gaining in adoption and implementations for quite some time now, what with database, e-mail, and other application-centric coverage,” said Schulz. “Application-aware and integrated backups make sense to ensure data consistency so that all data to maintain the state of the application is captured and protected, compared to simply capturing what files are on disk.”

TSM for MS SharePoint offers customers backup and recovery of MS SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Windows Storage Server 2.0 and 3.0) environments. It provides data backup at a granular level, allowing for recovery of all lists, libraries and items, including events, links, tasks, contacts, announcements, discussion boards, surveys, issues, portal links, layout templates and security metadata.

List price is $200 per 10 value units. Customers generally need 100 value units to license the product per processor core, so the product will in general cost $2,000 per processor core on the front end SharePoint webserver being protected.

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