LiteSpeed Integration with Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)

LiteSpeed users with Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) are aware of the various advantages that TSM offers in consolidating data from across LiteSpeed. TSM and LiteSpeed integrate to cover a very broad range of enterprise storage solutions, and therefore is a critical part of any major corporation's disaster recovery strategy. Database administrators (DBAs) and business disaster recovery planning (BDP) professionals utilize its data protection, resource management, and storage management capabilities. Its ability to manage objects is the core strength of the TSM architecture and considered by many as the best way to manage data. These are just few of the reasons that customers are looking at Tivoli as the favored choice to port their SQL Server backups. Currently, IBM provides the TDP-SQL client that can be used by DBAs to port their backups directly from SQL Server to a TSM server. DBAs need to use the Tivoli Data Protection (TDP) client GUI or to script in the TDP syntax to move backup data from the database to storage.

LiteSpeed for SQL Server from Quest Software provides the functionality to do similar backups from SQL Server to TSM-managed storage using plain TSQL scripts. LiteSpeed is a niche software in the SQL Server backup and recovery space. With benefits like compressed database backups, encryption, and multi-threaded backups to disk, tape, and UNC paths, LiteSpeed is easily one of the best performing backup software for SQL Server. The software is cluster-aware and also 64-bit and SQL Server 2008 ready. Incorporating functionality to send LiteSpeed backups directly to a TSM Server, LiteSpeed can now serves as the bridge that will effectively move a SQL Server database backup directly into Tivoli Storage. Because the backup data stream is compressed as part of the backup process this effectively reduces the network footprint of the backup as it transits across the network from the database server to storage. LiteSpeed complement Tivoli's restore process by reducing the size of the database backups that need to be handled during a restore scenario. This paper will provide an overview of how LiteSpeed can be implemented in SQL Server environments to do database backups directly to TSM storage.