IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family.

TSM descended from a project done at IBM's Almaden Research Center around 1988 to back up VM/CMS systems.

This database may generally be queried via an emulated SQL-98 compliant interface, or through undocumented SHOW, CREATE or DELETE commands.

Actual user data is managed via a cascading hierarchy of storage media (Primary Storage Pools) presented as raw devices (UNIX), filesystem containers (Windows and Linux), streaming tape or optical media.

The TSM Client of the same release is supported on NetWare, macOS, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, z/OS, Solaris, and Windows 32/64-bit.

This still differs from traditional full/incremental style backup products in that the files are stored separately or in smaller aggregates rather than as a monolithic image.

Other data injectors include policy-based hierarchical storage management (HSM) components for AIX, Linux and Windows.

GPFS provides transparent access to data whether online on disk or migrated to tape by requesting file saves and retrieves from TSM.

Aside from TSM's UNIX HSM product, only the "Backup" and "Archive" management facilities are accessed through the client API.