IBM Plans Major Upgrades to Tivoli Storage Software

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IBM will be announcing major upgrades to its Tivoli storage management suite at next week’s developerWorks conference in New Orleans.

The additional autonomic, self-managing functionality will reduce
maintenance and training costs and will allow customers to manage 10 times
the amount of storage with just one storage administrator, claims Paul Ellis of
the Tivoli Storage Market Management Group.

“I personally think that Tivoli has one of the strongest Enterprise
Storage Management strategies of any of the vendors in the market,” says
Nancy Marrone, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “They are
leveraging the entire Tivoli solution set and are integrating their storage
management solutions with their enterprise management solutions,
providing a very comprehensive overall solution.

“There are only a handful of vendors that will be able to target the entire enterprise
with cohesive management solutions. IBM, HP, and CA are the top three,
and I believe IBM Tivoli’s strategy is one the most impressive I’ve
seen to date.”

The additional intelligent technology has been added to Tivoli’s existing line of storage
management products, which includes SAN management, storage resource management, and data protection software.

IBM Tivoli is enabling three current products — IBM Tivoli Storage Resource
Manager, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and IBM Tivoli Storage Area Network
Manager — with the enhanced self-managing capabilities.

IBM Tivoli Storage Area Network Manager v1.2 monitors and manages
heterogeneous enterprise storage network environments. According to IBM, it offers new
enterprise-level scalability and reduces SAN management complexities
through its standards-based device discovery, topology rendering,
monitoring, and management of SAN components. It also serves as
a single focal point for monitoring the health of the storage area
network.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager v1.2 includes new capacity
provisioning technology for ensuring application availability by
automatically provisioning storage as necessary to prevent file systems
from running out of space. This autonomic approach reduces
administrative workload, allowing IT staff to focus on higher level
tasks, contends IBM.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager v1.2 now includes an automated file system
extension with provisioning to ensure file system space availability;
ESS subsystem reporting that enables management of intelligent disk
subsystems within the context of the enterprise storage environment; and
integration into systems management to enable the use of a single
enterprise-wide console.

Ellis claims there is “no dominant player” in the storage resource
management space, “and we have some of the best technology out there. We
think we have the potential to really dominate that space.” The
technology itself comes from last year’s acquisition of TrelliSoft.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2, IBM Tivoli’s flagship data protection
storage management software, provides a single solution for managing
storage and protecting data across the network. It offers a high level
of data protection while moving less data, and requires fewer tapes and
less bandwidth to simplify storage administration through automated
policy-based management.

The new Storage Manager functionality includes bare metal restore for
Microsoft Windows XP and .NET, extended application and platform
support, increased efficiency of SAN management through automatic configuration, LAN-free enhancements (including performance,
tape mount retention, and configuration), and improved hierarchical
storage management usability.

“IBM Tivoli software was among the first in the industry to take a
systems management-focused view of the storage network in an effort to
help customers optimize their storage to meet their overall business
needs,” maintains Laura Sanders, vice president for IBM Tivoli storage
software. “We are fulfilling our vision to autonomically manage storage
capacity, backup, and disaster recovery to enable IT to reallocate
resources to other mission-critical business needs.”

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