Glossary.

C

Containers

An application container is a stand-alone, all-in-one package solution for a software application. Containers  include the  application  binaries plus the software dependencies and the hardware requirements needed to run; all wrapped up into an independent, self-contained unit.

D

Data deduplication

Data deduplication is a process that eliminates redundant copies of data and reduces storage overhead. Data deduplication techniques ensure that only one unique instance of data is retained on storage media, such as disk, flash or tape. Using data deduplication can heavily reduce the amount of data that you are storing. Common deduplication ratios are 2:1. Deduplication rates can be confusing. Some vendors express reduction as a percentage of savings instead of a ratio. If a vendor cites a 50% capacity savings, it's equivalent to a 2:1 deduplication ratio. A ratio of 10:1 is the same as 90% savings.

H

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid Cloud allows an organisation to take advantage of the benefits of Public Cloud without using it to run all of their services. They may retain a presence on-premise and take advantage of bursting into the Cloud when they meet periods of peak demand, or they might have a model which sees some critical data remain on-premise with applications residing in Public Cloud. Organisations using Hybrid Cloud would use an application to allow the two locations to interact well with each other such as IBM Multi-Cloud Manager, or Red Hat Openshift Container Platform.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V is Microsoft's hardware virtualization product. It lets you create and run a software version of a computer, called a virtual machine within a Hypervisor. Advantages of virtualization are that it allows organisations to share compute and storage resource amongst a pool of machines. It enables quick delivery of new servers, and it’s much simpler to back them up as this can be done at the Hypervisor level rather than a traditional backup method which has to navigate through every filesystem.

I

IBM Cloud Platform

The IBM® cloud platform combines platform as a service (PaaS) with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to provide an integrated experience. The platform scales and supports both small development teams and organizations, and large enterprise businesses. Globally deployed across data centres around the world, the solution you build on IBM Cloud™ spins up fast and performs reliably in a tested and supported environment you can trust. The platform is built to support your needs whether it's working only in the public cloud or taking advantage of a multi-cloud deployment model. With our open-source technologies, such as Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and a full range of compute options, including virtual machines, containers, bare metal, and serverless, you have as much control and flexibility as you need to support workloads in your hybrid environment. You can deploy cloud-native apps while also ensuring workload portability. Whether you need to migrate apps to the cloud, modernize your existing apps by using cloud services, ensure data resiliency against regional failure, or leverage new paradigms and deployment topologies to innovate and build your cloud-native apps, the platform's open architecture is built to accommodate your use case.

K

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.

M

Multi Cloud

Multi Cloud is used to describe a strategy where an organisation may use multiple cloud products from a variety of different vendors. This may be an online Payroll application or online email service. Analysis has shown that enterprise organisations often use up to 20 vendors as part of their Multi Cloud strategy and have to consider whether they are purchasing security and resiliency with each of them, or whether they need to take alternative steps.

O

Object storage

Computer data storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manage data as a file hierarchy and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Object storage uses a different protocol which is accessed through APIs, sent to the storage by the backup program.

P

Post-dedupe

This is used to represent the amount of data stored after deduplication has taken effect. Effectively it’s a representation of the amount of storage that the data is using within the system.

Post-Process Deduplication

This is another method of deduplication whereby the reduction algorithms are applied to the data after it has landed in the server. This means that the backup server needs to have enough storage to receive the full size of the backup objects, and then a process has to be run to reclaim the space that has been freed up by the deduplication algorithms. This method is not as typically as efficient as Inline Deduplication.

Pre-dedupe

This is used to represent the amount of data stored before deduplication has taken effect. This is the amount of storage that the data would take if no data reduction techniques were being used.

Private cloud

A Private Cloud is a cloud like environment provisioned within an organisation’s own infrastructure. It allows them to use cloud functionality such as self-service provisioning and usage-based charging metrics for their own internal users. Because it is a single-tenant environment, there are not risks associated with a public cloud multi-tenant environment.

Public cloud

A Public Cloud is a location on the Public Internet where a Third-Party Cloud Provider can allow an organisation to store data or provision infrastructure or applications via a Self-Service Portal. This is usually provisioned rapidly, and the organisation will charge customers based on their usage.

PVU (Processor Value Unit)

Unit of measurement by which a programme can be licensed. In SP, PVU is the estimate of the client devices and server devices that are being managed by SP. This is a more historical way of licensing a Spectrum Protect estate that needs manual intervention to reconcile. It can prove to be expensive compared to other licensing methods.

R

Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift is a family of containerization software developed by Red Hat (which was acquired by IBM in 2019). Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform—an on-premises PaaS built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes.

Replication

Data Replication is the process of storing data in more than one site, to improve the availability of data. This feature is available in both IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, and is the modern-day equivalent of taking a tape copy of the data and storing it at an offsite location. It is simply copying data from a database, from one server to another server so that all users can share the same data without inconsistency.

Retention set

Data may need to be retained for an extended period of time, subject to Government, industry and business regulations. Spectrum Protect allows users to create a retention copy of data at a Point-In-Time by marking data that is already in the Spectrum Protect server. This is called a Retention Set and details of these can be viewed in Predatar Analytics.

S

Spectrum Protect (SP)

IBM Spectrum Protect is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect family. It enables backup and recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

Spectrum Protect Node

A node represents a system on which a backup or application client is installed. This system is registered to the IBM Spectrum Protect server. Each node has a unique name (node name) that is used to identify the system to the server. All of the data stored for that particular system will be stored in a hierarchical format under that node name.

Spectrum Protect Plus (SPP)

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a solution for data protection and data access focused on virtual environments, with additional support for modern databases and cloud applications. Spectrum Protect Plus enables easy data reuse of your backup objects, allowing users to recover or make clones of VMs and databases to enable DevOps pipelines. Spectrum Protect Plus also has a Global File Search which allows users to locate copies of a particular file across the breadth of the backup estate.

Suite for Unified Recovery (SUR)

The SUR occupancy is the amount of space that is used to store data that is managed by the Tivoli Storage Manager products that are included in the SUR bundle.

T

TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager)

The previous name for Spectrum Protect.

V

Virtualisation

Virtualisation is the process of creating a software-based, or virtual, representation of something. Such as: virtual applications, servers, storage and networks. It is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and agility for all size businesses. Benefits of Virtualisation Virtualisation can increase IT agility, flexibility and scalability while creating significant cost savings. Greater workload mobility, increased performance and availability of resources, automated operations are all further benefits of virtualisation that make IT simpler to manage and less costly to own and operate. Additional benefits include:

  • Reduced capital and operating costs.
  • Minimized or eliminated downtime.
  • Increased IT productivity, efficiency, agility and responsiveness.
  • Faster provisioning of applications and resources.
  • Greater business continuity and disaster recovery.
  • Simplified data center management.
  • Availability of a true Software-Defined Data Center

VMware

Global leading provider of the virtualisation and cloud infrastructure solutions in the IT industry (where VM stands for Virtual Machine).