Command storage from end-to-end with IBM Tivoli

Intelligent storage management: More crucial than ever

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Ask any CIO about storage management and you'll get a predictable answer: It's no place for compromise.

The reasoning behind this answer is clear. Applications, systems, and IT services all rely directly on storage as a vital resource; this means managing storage effectively can and will translate into tremendous business value by benefiting virtually every aspect of organizational operations. Conversely, when storage is inadequately managed, the consequences can be staggering—all the way from lost data to problematic service management to diminished revenues to brand damage.

However, a large and growing array of challenges make optimal storage management a tricky proposition. Data volumes, for instance, are rapidly scaling up; some studies predict a tenfold increase in the five-year period between 2006 and 2011. Data is also distributed across more classes of storage solutions than ever, involving a wide range of different performance and implementation details to consider, and orchestrating management of them all, with regard to holistic business value, can be a puzzle. Ideally, the specifics of technical implementation could be abstracted out; storage would then be managed with an information-centric perspective designed for simplicity, service availability, scalability, and prioritized performance—in short, the business bottom line.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center delivers comprehensive storage management throughout the infrastructure

“These tools comprise a storage management platform specifically designed to reduce management complexity—a centralized solution, spanning storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management, rather than isolated tools for each of those domains.” IBM's answer to the storage management conundrum: the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite of tools (formerly known as the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center).

Together, these tools comprise a storage management platform specifically designed to reduce management complexity—a centralized solution, spanning multiple storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management, rather than isolated tools for each of those domains. Thanks to an end-to-end topology, trending and analytics, monitoring and reporting and other powerful features, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) gives IT managers an elegant way to ensure their storage investments generate as much business value as possible at a time when every dollar counts.

On April 28 of this year, IBM announced a major new release of TPC, version 4.1, which has been architected to map directly to emerging customer interests and requests. Specifically, TPC has been enhanced to deliver improved value via three underlying themes: Simplify, Optimize and Centralize.

Simplify: Quick time-to-value

The easier and faster it is for administrators to deploy and manage storage tools, the more business value they will generate.

For this reason, all components of TPC 4.1 can now be installed in one procedure on open systems platforms. Furthermore, TPC integration with IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication has been enhanced; administrators can now start the TPC for Replication interface from within the TPC interface, policy-based alerts can be generated based on SNMP traps and a superuser role can be created to administer all TPC commands.

Also included and integrated: the IBM Tivoli Integrated Portal, through which developers can build administrative interfaces spanning both IBM and third-party storage tools.

Security has also been simplified in TPC 4.1, thanks to support for the Enterprise Security Service, which allows a single sign-on (SSO) process to suffice even when multiple systems are involved. (One note: SSO functionality is limited if operating system authentication is selected.)

TPC 4.1 agents, used to collect data from storage solutions, are now simpler to deploy and manage because the TPC server automatically updates them. And storage resource groups can be created to allow effortless orchestration of critical storage resources, including features such as health tracking, application modeling, and grouping by any logical dimension (geography, project, ownership, etc.) for convenience. These groups can then be leveraged in storage policies to spur overall storage availability and performance.

Finally, custom reports, based on IBM DB2 views and generated by Structured Query Language requests, can now be created to help administrators more easily correlate technical changes in the storage infrastructure to their bigger-picture business impact.

Optimize: Accelerated performance

Clearly, when storage management tools have higher performance, or enable higher performance from their supported solutions, the overall business value of the storage infrastructure will climb. Two major enhancements in TPC 4.1 are therefore designed to spur performance in just this way.

The first is the aptly-named Storage Performance Optimizer, a tool-within-the-tool that helps analyze storage arrays and pools for hot spots or bottlenecks—thus giving administrators powerful information they can leverage to increase performance or improve storage consolidation/migration plans.

The Storage Performance Optimizer works by polling supported storage devices to obtain performance thresholds for component utilization; it also obtains configuration input and performance input profile data drawn from the TPC database. Subsequently, it analyzes the results and generates a graphical overview (heat map) administrators can use to see where utilizations rates are high (hot) to low (cold), as well as an optimization report that makes logical migration suggestions based on performance requirements and the heat map.

Working together with the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, the IT administrator can perform the non-disruptive movement of storage pools to an optimal configuration without interrupting normal day-to-day operations.

The second optimization feature, collectively speaking, are the enhancements included in IBM® Tivoli® Storage Productivity Center for Replication. TPC for Replication is designed to make management and execution of IBM advanced copy services easy and care-free. New to TPC for Replication 4.1 are Global Copy support for minimal application impact during a replication session, Session Progress Indicators, Metro Global Mirror with Practice volumes to allow disaster recovery test operations, and others. All serve to ensure replication is as efficient and tailored for organizational needs as possible.

Centralize: Federated management

The third theme of TPC 4.1 improvements lies in its bolstered value proposition as a centralized storage management solution.

Storage is now available on more solutions, and serves more business purposes, than ever. When administrators are forced to use their many management tools, each of which may have a different interface and feature set, the outcome can be a slowed IT response to changing storage needs.

Fortunately, centralized solutions such as TPC can play a key role in helping administrators get the most out of storage with the least effort—increasing overall responsiveness and management consistency while also driving down the associated costs.

New in TPC 4.1 is support for an even more extensive range of features and functionality, across an even broader array of storage technologies and offerings, than ever before. These now include the IBM General Parallel File System, IBM System Storage DS8000 4.2, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 4.3.1, EMC PowerPath, IBM System Storage N series, IBM XIV Storage System, multi-path subsystem device drivers, High-Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) and NetApp® FAS devices.

Announced in conjunction with TPC 4.1, is an entirely new offering: the IBM Storage Enterprise Resource Planner (SERP). SERP is a powerful tool for generating storage-centric business intelligence reports of many types.

These include, for instance, line-of-business views of the storage infrastructure, to determine and report on who is using different storage solutions, and to what extent. Also included in SERP are environmental and imported business data drawn from storage resource management (SRM) databases offered by leading SRM vendors including IBM, EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, and HP.