What's new for IBM Spectrum Control 5.4.2

New features and enhancements are available in IBM Spectrum Control 5.4.2.

Update for IBM Virtual Storage Center

IBM® Virtual Storage Center is a storage solution that provides efficient reporting, management, virtualization, and data protection for heterogeneous storage environments.

When you purchase a license for IBM Virtual Storage Center, you get:

All the virtualization features that are available in IBM Spectrum Virtualize.
The remote-mirroring and FlashCopy (snapshot) features available in IBM SAN Volume Controller.
The reporting and replication features available in IBM Spectrum Control and IBM Copy Services Manager.
The snapshot-based protection, which is provided by IBM Spectrum Protect™ Snapshot, for the applications and databases that are used by IBM Spectrum Control.

IBM Virtual Storage Center is available in three editions. Each license has different options so that you can pick the license that best suits your storage needs:

IBM Virtual Storage Center
IBM Virtual Storage Center Starter Edition
IBM Virtual Storage Center for IBM Storwize®

In this Q1 2021 update, the edition "IBM Virtual Storage Center Entry Edition" was renamed to "IBM Virtual Storage Center Starter Edition".

Along with the renaming, capacity limits in IBM Virtual Storage Center Starter Edition were increased to better meet your needs. Now, you can use the IBM Virtual Storage Center Starter Edition to manage up to 1,500 TIBs of usable capacity. That's an increase of 1,000 TiBs over the previous limit! Speaking of limits, the previous limit of 4 I/O groups was removed, so you're no longer restricted by the number of I/O groups in your environment.

See IBM Virtual Storage Center.

Protect IBM Spectrum Control with IBM Spectrum Protect™ Snapshot

Protecting the application and databases that IBM Spectrum Control uses to help monitor your storage and store its metadata is important to us. That's why IBM Spectrum Control includes a license for IBM Spectrum Protect Snapshot, which provides fast, application-aware backups and restores, leveraging advanced snapshot technologies to help improve your cyber resiliency.

IBM Spectrum Protect Snapshot is available with the following editions of IBM Spectrum Control:

IBM Spectrum Control Advanced and IBM Spectrum Control Advanced Select editions
IBM Virtual Storage Center and IBM Virtual Storage Center Entry editions

If you have these editions of IBM Spectrum Control, see how to get your copy of IBM Spectrum Protect Snapshot at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6410806.

For more information about IBM Spectrum Protect Snapshot and its capabilities, see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/sps.

Free 90-day trial of IBM Spectrum Control is now available!

From a single console, get insights into the health, performance, and capacity consumption of your storage environment.

Discover, explore, and try out the features that help you manage your storage environment, such as:

Monitoring the health of your storage systems and devices
Monitoring the performance and capacity of your storage systems, fabrics, and switches
Performance troubleshooting and reporting
Capacity planning, management, and reporting
Alerting and alert policies

Go to free 90-day trial of IBM Spectrum Control.

For more information, see Signing up is easy!

Note: The trial version of IBM Spectrum Control runs on a virtual machine in an Open Virtualization Format (OVF). It is not intended for use in a production environment, or for customer distribution, and the trial version isn’t supported by IBM Support. A getting started guide is included in the download package and you can access the IBM Storage Community to get help from storage management experts and other IBM Spectrum Control users.

Product fixes and security updates

In every release of IBM Spectrum® Control, IBM fixes issues that are reported by our internal teams and by our customers. Along with fixes, improving the operation and security of the product is also a priority. See what's been updated and fixed in this release:

Limitations and known issues

For information about limitations and known issues that might occur when you use IBM Spectrum Control 5.4.2, see External link icon Limitations and known issues.