"Leverage Competitive Advantages in Storage Management"

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"IBM offers a comprehensive, flexible storage software portfolio that helps organizations address storage management challenges across the enterprise, including data centers, remote/branch offices and desktop/laptop computers. Learn more about the specific components within the IBM storage software family that can help you create a more responsive and resilient storage infrastructure for your on demand business."
Source: IBM

Resources Related to Leverage Competitive Advantages in Storage Management:

• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM or ITSM) (Wikipedia)
• Computer Data Storage (Wikipedia)

Leverage Competitive Advantages in Storage Management

Of the many challenges businesses face today, managing data growth is surely one of the most daunting. But while there are myriad choices for storage management solutions, most legacy options cannot address changing business requirements, and the results can cost your organization money, time and peace of mind. IBM Tivoli® storage management solutions are different, with robust features that allow you to optimize your service environment and successfully meet your business challenges.

There's no doubt that as data growth continues unabated, organizations must find smarter ways to store and manage their massive volumes of data, with an eye towards improving service levels and lowering costs as well as addressing new business requirements, such as compliance, e-discovery and business continuity. But while this data growth translates into a wide range of increasing management challenges, legacy solutions have not kept pace and therefore fail to address these challenges, subjecting organizations to the following:

• Proliferation of duplicate data, resulting in increased costs
• Lengthy restore times, resulting in unmet service goals
• Unreliable backup, resulting in increased risk

IBM Tivoli storage management solutions offer features that address each of these challenges, creating significant advantages over competitive offerings—advantages from which your organization can greatly benefit.

The IBM Tivoli storage management family of products provides a unified recovery platform that helps you optimize your current storage environment, reduce operational and capital costs, improve service and manage risks. Flagship products such as IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Fast Back address the problems posed by traditional storage solutions and enable a more dynamic storage environment—one that helps you respond to changing business requirements.

For more information

IBM is uniquely positioned to provide a wide range of storage management solutions, even for mixed-vendor environments. We can help you implement a dynamic storage infrastructure that scales to meet your changing business requirements. To learn more about how IBM Tivoli storage management solutions can help you address data management concerns in your environment, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/storage.

About Tivoli software from IBM

Tivoli software offers a service management platform for organizations to deliver quality service by providing visibility, control and automation—visibility to see and under-stand the workings of their business; control to effectively manage their business, help minimize risk and protect their brand; and automation to help optimize their business, reduce the cost of operations and deliver new services more rapidly. Unlike IT-centric service management, Tivoli software delivers a common foundation for managing, integrating and aligning both business and technology requirements. Tivoli software is designed to quickly address an organization's most pressing service management needs and help proactively respond to changing business demands. The Tivoli portfolio is backed by world-class IBM Services, IBM Support and an active ecosystem of IBM Business Partners. Tivoli clients and Business Partners can also leverage each other's best practices by participating in independently run IBM Tivoli User Groups around the world—visit http://www.tivoli-ug.org/

Contents

• Understand the current storage management landscape
• Legacy solutions do not address many storage management challenges
• Proliferation of duplicate data and increased costs
• Lengthy restore times and unmet service goals
• Unreliable backup and increased risk
• Address additional storage management challenges
• For more information
• About Tivoli software from IBM

Understand the current storage management landscape

Despite the slowing economy, unabated data growth continues, which translates into a wide range of increasing management challenges. At the same time, organizations are struggling to reduce costs and adhere to higher service level agreements, including higher availability and zero data loss requirements. Many also face the challenges of integrating disparate systems and processes due to ongoing mergers and acquisitions.

When it comes to managing this tidal wave of data and its associated challenges, there exist many products and approaches from which to choose. But most of these offerings have not kept pace with the many new and highly complex requirements of storage. The failure to address these requirements can result in a number of significant challenges for businesses.

But while traditional storage management solutions lag behind the requirements being placed on the storage environment, IBM Tivoli® storage management solutions have evolved to meet these needs. IBM solutions help organizations not only manage the enormous volume of data, but also optimize performance and reduce expenditures. Three key solutions can help you accomplish these goals:

• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6, which enables the fast backup and recovery of a broad range of systems through comprehensive data management and data reduction capabilities.
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Fast Back, a next-generation data protection and disaster recovery solution, which helps mid- and large-sized organizations establish around-the-clock protection of mission-critical applications in data centers and remote offices.
• IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, a storage resource management solution, which provides a single interface to manage your entire storage infrastructure, including mixed-vendor storage systems.

Legacy solutions do not address many storage management challenges

Though there are numerous traditional storage management solutions, a gap exists between the increasing demand for data availability and the ability of these traditional methods to efficiently deliver and recover data. This gap translates into a great many potential problems for businesses, including increased costs, unmet service levels and increased risk. But Tivoli storage management solutions are optimized to close this gap. They result in greater efficiency that reduces costs, improves performance, delivers unmatched scalability to better meet service levels and offers a higher level of reliability to manage risk.

Proliferation of duplicate data and increased costs

With ever more data to back up, data duplication becomes increasingly difficult to combat. But many traditional storage management solutions do not address this problem; instead, their requirements to perform periodic full backups create a proliferation of duplicate data, which in turn increases costs, makes recovery more difficult and increases risk.

In contrast, you can keep your data footprint to a minimum—and reduce expenditures—with Tivoli storage management solutions. Tivoli Storage Manager features a data management lifecycle model that can enable you to identify, protect, securely move, archive and delete data as appropriate. The progressive incremental methodology used by Tivoli Storage Manager only backs up new or changed versions of files, thereby greatly reducing data redundancy, network bandwidth and storage pool consumption as compared to traditional methodologies that are based on periodic full backups. Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition also includes built-in data deduplication for disk storage pools to further reduce capacity requirements. Tivoli Storage Manager also works in concert with storage hardware to exploit other data reduction techniques such as sub file backup, client compression and device compression.

Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack also works to conserve resources. Its block-level incremental backup capabilities send only changed data to help save CPU, disk and network resources. And it centralizes control of remote and branch office data protection and recovery. By blending continuous, frequent and scheduled protection engines, Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack helps to reduce the amount of data at risk while eliminating the need for traditional backup windows.

To facilitate additional reduction of redundant data, Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Data features robust functions that enable you to conserve disk space by identifying duplicate data, orphan data, temporary data, non business data and infrequently accessed data that can be migrated to less-expensive, secondary storage platforms—or deleted from the environment.

Lengthy restore times and unmet service goals

Businesses can no longer afford to be without access to information and they have a low tolerance for any data loss. Consequently, companies need more reliable backup and faster recovery. The recovery processes of traditional storage management solutions require hours or days, resulting in increased downtime and failure to meet crucial service goals such as higher availability, zero data loss requirements, and shorter backup windows and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

You can improve service levels by shortening backup and recovery times and maximizing application availability with advanced data recovery management technologies through Tivoli solutions. Tivoli Storage Manager optimizes the speed of backup and recovery through its disk staging capabilities and allows you to back up more systems concurrently.

Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is key to improving service levels because it provides near-instant recovery from almost any type of data loss, including user error (deleted files or folders), software errors and virus attacks (corrupted data-bases), hardware failure (disk or system crash) and disasters (lost local or regional facilities). Through the use of patented recovery techniques, complete data and

Unreliable backup and increased risk

Traditionally, data loss has been a result of hardware failure and disasters. Today, however, up to 79 percent of data loss can be attributed to human error, software corruption and virus attacks.1Your data is especially vulnerable when it is only backed up once a day or when data is compromised by low levels of infra-structure integrity, as is the case with traditional storage management products.

You can better manage risk through Tivoli storage management solutions, with features such as continuous, frequent capture of data and built-in encryption. Tivoli Storage Manager enables you to protect your organization's data from failures and other errors by storing backup, archive, space management and bare-metal restore data—as well as compliance and disaster-recovery data—in a hierarchy of secondary storage. Because it is highly scalable, Tivoli Storage Manager can help protect computers running a variety of different operating systems, on hardware ranging from notebooks to mainframe computers that connect together through the Internet, wide area networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs) or storage area networks (SANs). Its Web-based management, intelligent data move-and-store techniques and comprehensive policy-based automation work together to help increase data protection and potentially decrease time and administration costs. Finally, Tivoli Storage Manager provides transaction logs with roll-forward recovery mode plus automatically generated disaster recovery plans and detailed tracking of offsite volumes for greater infra-structure integrity. Tivoli Storage Manager also includes a new comprehensive set of reporting and monitoring capabilities to help you make better, faster decisions following events and changes in your IT environment.

Rather than offer the traditional once-a-day backup, Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack features continuous data protection (CDP), which protects data as it is created, without impacting operations. Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack also eliminates the need to move tapes from a remote office to a central vault by efficiently replicating copies of your data over the wire to a central site for disaster recovery capabilities. As a result, you can reduce the risks of data loss from lost or stolen tapes.

The Tivoli Storage Productivity Center suite delivers expanded heterogeneous platform support, advanced reporting and security features for multivendor storage environments. IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Data is designed to add intelligence to data protection and retention practices. IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication allows you to control and monitor copy services operations (like IBM FlashCopy®, Metro Mirror and Global Mirror capabilities)and use data replication for data protection and disaster recovery.

Address additional storage management challenges

Many additional factors provide challenges to the storage management environment:

• A growing number of systems, storage devices and applications from multiple vendors
• Changing regulatory and corporate governance mandates
• System and process integration driven by mergers and acquisitions

Traditional storage management solutions are not intended for stressful environments that can pose challenges to performance and scalability, such as large databases and encrypted data. Also critical is organizational growth and change, which generally create more data. With traditional solutions, more data means longer backups and missed backup windows. As a result, data may not be protected at all.

Tivoli Storage Manager 6 offers dramatically increased scalability and performance over competitive offerings. A single Tivoli Storage Manager server can man-age up to one billion data objects, which can be files, databases and images of entire volumes. Additionally, Tivoli Storage Manager 6 can run a larger number of concurrent operations than ever before. And it dramatically simplifies management by eliminating virtually all database administration tasks. It can also easily transfer work between backup servers to accommodate acquisitions, consolidations, reorganizations and growth.

Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack also contributes to storage management simplification through full automation that features a "set it and forget it" policy engine. Additionally, its self-managing repository always has a set number of data iterations on hand for easy rollback and fast recovery. Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack also features integrated support for all Microsoft® Windows®-based applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle and SAP. An optional IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Microsoft Exchange component recovers granular Exchange data objects quickly.

Tivoli Storage Productivity Center can also help reduce storage complexity with storage reporting across host file systems, databases and storage. It provides correlation between host usage and storage assets as well as comprehensive reporting on virtualized environments.

For more information

IBM is uniquely positioned to provide a wide range of storage management solutions, even for mixed-vendor environments. We can help you implement a dynamic storage infrastructure that scales to meet your changing business requirements. To learn more about how IBM Tivoli storage management solutions can help you address data management concerns in your environment, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/storage.

About Tivoli software from IBM

Tivoli software offers a service management platform for organizations to deliver quality service by providing visibility, control and automation—visibility to see and understand the workings of their business; control to effectively manage their business, help minimize risk and protect their brand; and automation to help optimize their business, reduce the cost of operations and deliver new services more rapidly. Unlike IT-centric service management, Tivoli software delivers a common foundation for managing, integrating and aligning both business and technology requirements. Tivoli software is designed to quickly address an organization's most pressing service management needs and help proactively respond to changing business demands. The Tivoli portfolio is backed by world-class IBM Services, IBM Support and an active ecosystem of IBM Business Partners. Tivoli clients and Business Partners can also leverage each other's best practices by participating in independently run IBM Tivoli User Groups around the world—visit http://www.tivoli-ug.org/

Additionally, IBM Global Financing can tailor financing solutions to your specific IT needs. For more information on great rates, flexible payment plans and loans, and asset buyback and disposal, visit: ibm.com/financing