IBM Unveils New Storage Management Suite
The company's new IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center integrates existing and new storage management tools in a single suite to manage a complete storage infrastructure, including the SAN fabric, components such as hard drives, related databases and SAN performance, said Theresa O'Neil, IBM's director of market strategy for storage software.
Integrated into the Productivity Center is Tivoli Storage Manager, which scales to hundreds of servers running under multiple operating systems and backs up, restores, archives and retrieves data; Tivoli SAN Manager, a management solution for multivendor SANs that offers automatic resource and topology discovery, monitoring and alerts, zone control and SAN error-prediction capabilities; and Tivoli Storage Resource Manager, with enterprisewide reporting and monitoring, policy-based management and automated capacity-provisioning capabilities.
IBM also unveiled a new storage management application, Multiple Device Manager, which allows the configuration, management and performance monitoring of storage from a single console.
It includes two applications: Performance Manager, to collect SAN performance data for use in tuning a SAN, and Replication Manager, which automates data replications using IBM's Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) and FlashCopy functions.
The key to the Productivity Center offering is the integration between new and existing applications, which allows them to work together via a common console more closely than if they were used separately, O'Neil said.
For instance, with the Productivity Center, a customer could provision new storage devices and allocate a new LUN (logical unit number) using Multiple Device Manager and change zoning with Tivoli SAN Manager, all without having to jump to a different application, she said.
IBM plans to ship Productivity Center in May with prices starting at $5,000 for 1 Tbyte of managed storage capacity, O'Neil said.
Over 50 percent of IBM's storage software sales go through indirect channels, a figure which is expected to continue or grow with the new offering, O'Neil said.