IBM® Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) helps you implement a disciplined approach to managing your backups and provides you with an orderly way to retrieve lost or damaged data.
BRMS is the IBM strategic solution for planning and managing save
and restore operations on your iSeries™ server. BRMS base product provides
all of the functions that most iSeries users need to implement a fully
automated, single system, backup, recovery, and media management strategy.
Using BRMS, you can manage your most critical and complex saves, including
online backups of Lotus® servers, simply and easily. It also supports
parallel saves of a library or single object using up to 32 tape devices,
which shortens the save window by using multiple devices. You can also recover
your system fully in the event of a disaster or failure or restore single
objects or libraries from your save media. BRMS can also perform some daily
maintenance activities that are related to your backup routine.
In addition to these backup and recovery features, BRMS can
support and manage an unlimited number of media, shared tape devices, automated
tape libraries, virtual tape devices, and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager servers. BRMS
enables you to track all of your media from creation to expiration. You no
longer have to keep track of which items are on which volumes, and worry that
you will accidentally write over active data.
As your business needs change and grow, you can add function
to the BRMS base product by purchasing and installing additional options.
The Network feature of the BRMS product provides centralized management of
multiple BRMS systems within a network using native TCP/IP, Advanced Peer-to-Peer
Network (APPN), or both. A BRMS network system shares the inventory and policies
associated with media managed within BRMS network group. In addition, users
can view the save history of any system in the network from a single system.
The networking feature also simplifies media duplication by using one system
in the network to duplicate media on behalf of another system in the network.
The systems in a BRMS network can be other iSeries systems or individual i5/OS™ partitions.
The Advanced Feature of the BRMS product enables Hierarchical
Storage Manager (HSM) archive with HSM dynamic retrieval and automated disk
pool data migration. Parallel saves works with the BRMS Advanced Feature to
allow for parallel archive and parallel dynamic retrieval of a single object.
The ability to dynamically retrieve a large database file in parallel helps
to reduce the window of the retrieval process. Therefore, it increases the
rewards for using HSM archive and dynamic retrieval support. The BRMS Advanced
Feature allows archive capabilities of database files, stream files, and documents
based on frequency of use, inactivity limit, object size, or disk pool thresholds.
BRMS provides both the traditional character-based interface and a graphical user interface (GUI), which is available as a plug-in to iSeries Navigator. These interfaces are not mutually exclusive. You can either choose both interfaces, using the character-based interface for some tasks and the BRMS plug-in for others, or you can choose to use one interface exclusively. However, differences between these BRMS interfaces do exist and you should be aware of them.