Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy® Manager is composed of several software components.
Figure 1. Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager system
components
- Application agent
- The application agent provides the necessary support to implement snapshot-based backup and restore operations. This agent interacts with the applications and tracks when a Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager backup is created for a specific application.
- Management agent
- The management agent acsd coordinates all the components that are involved in backup, restore, and cloning operations. The agent controls the flow of information among the application and device agents, and other daemons. The agent provides access to the snapshot backup repository. This repository contains information about the snapshot backups and their relationships to snapshot-capable storage devices.
- Device agent
- The acsgen device agent is a generic agent
that interacts with storage device-specific adapters and the central
controller agent. This agent is also used to send and request updates
of the progress and usability information that is stored in the local
snapshot backup repository. The following lists the storage device-specific agents that communicate with the acsgen agent:
- The CIM adapter fmcima is used with the generic device agent acsgen. This adapter issue commands to the supported storage device by using the CIM interface. Examples of supported storage include DS8000®, Storwize® V7000, and SAN Volume Controller.
- The XIV® storage adapter is used with the generic device agent acsgen. This adapter communicates with the acsgen agent and issues commands to the XIV Storage System by using the command-line interface XCLI.
- The N series and NetApp storage adapter fmna is used with the generic device agent acsgen. This adapter issue commands to the storage device by using the NetApp ONTAPI interface.
- Offload agent
- The offload agent tsm4acs is used to send an existing snapshot to Tivoli Storage Manager. This agent also calls the generic device agent for mount and unmount operations on a backup system. From the command-line interface fcmcli, you can manually start an offload backup to Tivoli Storage Manager.
- Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager command-line interface
- The command-line interface fcmcli, is used to issue various commands.