Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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WysDM for Backups. This product has cross-domain reporting capabilities, and a predictive analysis engine capable of carrying out complex logical and mathematical operations on data to spot trends and proactively alert on future error conditions. "WysDM goes very deep when it comes to backups, but they need to expand to replication," says Schulz. WysDM for Backups and Aptare StorageConsole are the two products in this roundup that have expanded the furthest beyond backup reporting.
Backup application reporting features
DPRM tools supply some of the reports and features that major backup vendors can add fairly easily to their apps. For example:
BakBone Software Inc. offers the NetVault:Report Manager family of reporting tools, but they report only on products within the BakBone NetVault family.
EMC opted against developing its own DPRM tool and instead licenses and resells WysDM for Backups as EMC Backup Advisor (EBA), a heterogeneous, highly customizable enterprise reporting tool. With EMC NetWorker Dashboard, EMC offers an optional scaled-down version of EBA for EMC NetWorker customers. Unlike EBA, EMC NetWorker Dashboard isn't customizable, comes with approximately 150 reports and works only with EMC NetWorker.
IBM Corp. depends on the reporting capabilities in Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), which is limited to mostly operational reporting. For more advanced reporting, IBM defers to third-party tools like Bocada and WysDM. "We're actively
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looking at features of other DPRM tools to get more trending reports," says Tricia Jiang, technical evangelist for TSM products at IBM.
Symantec has developed its own DPRM tool with Veritas Backup Reporter, which has its roots in the Veritas CommandCentral Service.
DPRM is evolving from passive reporting tools to proactive instruments that help storage managers better manage their backup environments with features like predictive analysis, cross-domain reporting, real-time monitoring and alerting, and reporting on the complete backup cycle. Although all of the tools are works in process to some degree, Aptare StorageConsole and WysDM for Backups appear to have the edge when it comes to next-generation DPRM features beyond reporting; the Illuminator Virtual Recovery Engine has the lead in disk-based data protection reporting.
This was first published in July 2007
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