Product components

The IBM Spectrum® Protect Plus solution is provided as a container or virtual appliance that includes storage and data movement components.

Sizing component requirements: Some environments might require more instances of these components to support greater workloads. For guidance about sizing, building, and integrating components in your IBM Spectrum Protect Plus environment, see the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Blueprints.

The following are the base components of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus:

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus server: This component manages the entire system. The server consists of several catalogs that track various system aspects such as restore points, configuration, permissions, and customizations. Typically, there is one IBM Spectrum Protect Plus server in a deployment, even if the deployment is spread across multiple locations.
Site: This component is an IBM Spectrum Protect Plus policy construct that is used to manage data placement in the environment. A site can be physical, such as a data center, or logical, such as a department or organization. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus components are assigned to sites to localize and optimize data paths. A deployment always has at least one site per physical location. The placement of backup data to a site is governed by service level agreement (SLA) policies.; If you are using a vSnap server as your primary backup storage location, the preferred method is to localize data movement to sites by placing vSnap servers and VADP proxies together at a single site.
vSnap server: This component is a pool of disk storage that receives data from production systems for data protection or reuse. The vSnap server consists of one or more disks and can be scaled up (by adding disks to increase capacity) or scaled out (by introducing multiple vSnap servers to improve overall performance).; The vSnap server is the required primary backup storage location for most, but not all, workload types in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. For information about available primary backup storage by workload type, see Managing backup storage.; In larger enterprise environments that use the vSnap server as the primary backup storage location, additional vSnap servers might be required. Each site can include one or more vSnap servers.

vSnap pool: This component is the logical organization of disks into a pool of storage space, which is used by the vSnap server component. This component is also referred to as a storage pool.

VADP proxy: This component is responsible for moving data from vSphere data stores to provide protection for VMware virtual machines and is required only for protection of VMware resources. Each site can include one or more VADP proxies.

User interfaces

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus provides the following interfaces for configuration, administrative, and monitoring tasks:

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus user interface

The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus user interface is the primary interface for configuring, administering, and monitoring data protection operations.

A key component of the interface is the dashboard, which provides summary information about the health of your environment. For more information about the dashboard, see Product dashboard.

The menu bar in the user interface contains the following items:

Item	Description
IBM Spectrum Protect icon	This icon opens IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center to provide expanded data protection. This icon is active only when the URL is entered in the IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center URL preference field on the Global Preferences page. For information about this preference, see Configuring global preferences.
Alerts icon	This icon opens the Alerts window. For more information about alerts, see Alerts.
Help icon	This icon opens the online help system.
User menu	This menu shows the name of the user who is logged on. The menu provides access to product information and what's new, quick start, and API documentation. You can also use this menu to complete tasks such as accessing logs and testing connections between IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and nodes. If you are logged on to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus as the superuser, you also use this menu to manage Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and the product license. If IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is installed as a set of OpenShift® containers, you can use this menu to update IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus superuser is the user who is assigned the SUPERUSER role. There is only one IBM Spectrum Protect Plus superuser. For more information about the superuser, see Managing the superuser account.

Depending on the browser window size, the navigation panel might push the main panel to the side for larger browser window sizes. For smaller browser window sizes, the navigation pane might overlap the main pane. You can click the collapse icon to collapse the navigation pane.

Restriction: The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus product does not follow International Components for Unicode (ICU) collation sorting for menus. Therefore, menus appear in code point order. In some languages, letters are sorted differently from code point order. As such, the sorted order of characters and words as they appear in menus when using these languages will appear out of expected order.

vSnap command-line interface

The vSnap command-line interface is a secondary interface for administering some data protection tasks. Run the vsnap command to access the command-line interface. The command can be invoked by the user ID serveradmin or any other operating system user who has vSnap administrator privileges.

Administrative console

The administrative console is available when IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is installed as a virtual appliance. The administrative console is used to complete administrative tasks such as updating, starting and stopping IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, resetting the credentials for the superuser account, changing the time zone for the application, and configuring network settings.

To log on to the administrative console, you can use the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus superuser account or the serveradmin user. The serveradmin user is used only to access the administrative console and the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus virtual appliance and is required in the following situations:

To log on to the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus virtual appliance operating system when working with IBM® Support.
To log on to the administrative console to complete tasks such a resetting the credentials for the superuser account. For example, when the password for the superuser account is lost.

You cannot use the serveradmin user to log on to the IBM Spectrum Protect Plus.

Example VMware deployment

The following figure shows IBM Spectrum Protect Plus deployed in two active locations. Each location has inventory that requires protection. Location 1 has a vCenter server and two vSphere datacenters (and an inventory of virtual machines) and Location 2 has a single datacenter (and a smaller inventory of virtual machines).

The IBM Spectrum Protect Plus server is deployed in only one of the sites. VADP proxies and vSnap servers (with their corresponding disks) are deployed in each site to localize data movement in the context of the protected vSphere resources.

Bidirectional replication is configured to take place between the vSnap servers at the two sites.

This figure depicts IBM Spectrum Protect Plus components in two locations — Figure 1. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus deployment across two geographical locations