IT organizations are challenged with maintaining application and data availability while satisfying compliance requirements and service level agreements. Relentless information growth is straining IT resources – necessitating greater investments – yet capital and operational expenses are under scrutiny. Given this conflict, IT organizations are seeking efficiency and optimization to regain control. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software is a client/server software solution providing backup/recovery, archive, hierarchical storage management (HSM), and disaster recovery (DR). This ESG Lab Validation focuses on key improvements in the TSM platform that drive greater efficiency: incorporation of the DB2 database for enhanced scalability, availability and performance; embedded data de-duplication; enhanced monitoring and reporting; as well as integration with NetApp's Snapshot Difference API and SnapMirror to tape technologies to back up IBM N series and NetApp FAS volumes. To read the report, go to IBM TSM 6.1 - Unified data protection and recovery management.