Storage Resource Management

As the tidal wave of data growth continues to drive the need for more and larger storage systems, the biggest problem that storage administrators face is how to manage all of these devices. Most companies have a blend of data storage systems that were acquired over time, often from different vendors. To manage all of this storage effectively, administrators need to know how much capacity is available, where it is, which applications are accessing it, and when it is likely to become full.

Understanding the storage environment, across heterogeneous systems, is a time consuming and often unachievable goal without sophisticated storage management systems. Committed to open standards, IBM's solution is architected to SNIA's (Storage Networking Industry Association) SMI-S standards and enables our SRM offering to provide deep-dive reporting capabilities across a wide range of multi-vendor storage devices.

IBM offers leading solutions in Storage Resource Management and were identified as "one of the most comprehensive and scalable" offerings within the industry and are designed to help maximize your disk system ROI with some of the industry's most advanced storage resource management capabilities. These solutions go far beyond basic capacity management and provisioning. IBM's solutions manage heterogenous storage systems as a single, aggregated pool of storage which can be tiered to meet specific business performance requirements.

They provide integrated administration across the entire environment, eliminating the need to separate management tools for each device. Leading-edge reporting and analytics put you in complete control - allowing you to quickly answer difficult questions:

• Are you meeting service level expectations for your users?

• How much and what type of storage should you plan on purchasing next, and when will it be needed?

• What data can be moved from primary storage to less expensive capacity, or archived to tape?

• Where are the performance bottlenecks, and what configurations changes can be made to address them?

IBM's Storage Resource Management solutions are designed to:

• Help reduce the complexity and cost of storage management

• Improve data availability

• Enable optimization and centralized, proactive management of storage devices

• Monitor and track the performance of Storage Area Networks (SANs)

Businesses must be able to identify, evaluate, control and predict the growth of data through its lifecycle in order to meet storage service levels in accordance with IT Information Library (ITIL) and data retention requirements. Both requirements—managing storage infrastructure and the data that resides there—are highly labor intensive. Storage infrastructure management tools such as IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center can help customers reduce the complexity of managing their storage environments by centralizing, simplifying and automating storage tasks associated with storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management.