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The TSM server can be viewed as an object storage server whose main goal is to efficiently store and retrieve named objects. The server has two main storage areas to meet this requirement:
Each object stored on the server has a name associated with it. The client controls the following key components of the name:
When making decisions about naming objects for an application, remember that it might be necessary to externalize the full object names to the end user. Specifically, the end user might need to specify the object in an Include or Exclude statement when the application is run.
A very important component of the name is the object space name. This name can be viewed as the name of a file system or disk drive, or any other high-level qualifier that groups related data together. TSM uses the object space to identify the file system or disk drive the data is located on. Thus, actions can be performed on all entities within an object space with relative ease, such as querying all objects within a specified object space.
The TSM server also has administrative commands to query the object spaces on a given node in TSM storage, and delete them if necessary. All data that the application client stores must have an object space name associated with it. Select the name carefully to group similar data together in the system.
An application client should select different object space names than the file system names a backup-archive client would use, in order to avoid possible interference. The application client should publish its object space names, so that end users can identify the objects for Include and Exclude statements, if necessary.
Another component of the object name is the pathname. The pathname consists of the directory path the object belongs in, and the actual name of the object in that directory path. When the object space name and pathname are concatenated, they must form a syntactically correct name on the operating system on which the client is running. It is not necessary for the name to exist as an object on the system or resemble the actual data on the local file system. However, the name must meet the standard naming rules in order to be properly processed for management classes.
The object type identifies the object as either a file or a directory. A file is an object that contains both attributes and binary data. A directory is an object that contains only attributes.
TSM also accepts the value BSAObjectType_DATABASE, but treats it as BSAObjectType_FILE.
The following example demonstrates what the application client would code on a UNIX platform:
/myobjspace/pathname