IBM® System Storage™ Multilevel Grid Access Manager Software (Grid Access Manager Software) is built on an open, high-performance grid architecture that delivers data protection, information life-cycle management, simplified storage management and multi-site data access based on open standards. The potential benefits derived from these features can help deliver important cost savings and operational efficiencies, including:
Simplified management and improved storage utilization, with excellent performance
Data protection and improved business continuity
Support for global access, multi-site operation
Grid Access Manager Software enables customers with single or multiple sites and with fixed content/reference data storage requirements to improve storage utilization and investment across sites by way of an enterprise-wide, fault-tolerant storage grid with real-time failover capabilities. Grid Access Manager Software can help protect enterprise data through automated replication, life-cycle management and digital signature functionality.
The need to retain massive volumes of business-critical fixed-content data for long periods of time presents new data and storage management challenges for IT. Users continue to demand fast performance and higher and broader availability of enterprise data. Massive data volumes combined with long retention periods require storage administrators to deliver a cost-effective storage strategy that meets the user’s needs, protects valuable data, scales on demand, simplifies data migration and automates recovery from both planned and unplanned downtime.
Grid Access Manager Software can help customers address these critical challenges by delivering an automated and virtualized storage and data management layer that can be deployed locally or across multiple facilities and even on heterogeneous storage hardware. Grid Access Manager Software achieves this by presenting itself to enterprise applications as a single storage system that can aggregate underlying storage silos into a single enterprise storage pool—even if these silos are spread across multiple facilities and consist of heterogeneous storage media. This highly automated system enables IT administrators to focus on storage planning and infrastructure improvements and eliminate many manual administration tasks.
Simplified Management and Optimized Storage Utilization
Grid Access Manager Software helps customers implement a virtualized, shared storage pool for reference data and fixed content. By operating across locations, multiple storage tiers and storage hardware brands, Grid Access Manager Software offers storage flexibility and easy extensibility to customers, and supports tiered storage architectures so organizations can have greater flexibility to implement the most cost-effective storage according to their defined policies while continuing to use existing investments. Key features include:
Intelligent information life-cycle management—Grid Access Manager Software enables the creation of information life-cycle management (ILM) policies that govern the geographic location and placement of data in a multi-tier, multi-facility storage system. Intelligent ILM can help deploy the right storage in the right place, on the right media, at the right time based on its relevance and value to the organization.
Operation across facilities and tiers—Capacity, performance and geographic scope of Grid Access Manager Software may be increased by adding new nodes. As nodes are added typically in a non-disruptive manner, Grid Access Manager Software can continue to present itself as one large scalable computing system. Grid Access Manager Software automatically reconfigures the environment to take advantage of the new resources.
Flexible Hardware Configurations—Grid Access Manager Software utilizes industry-standard servers and storage, empowering administrators to deliver a “best of breed” enterprise storage strategy with the flexibility to adapt over time. A Grid Access Manager Software solution can be composed of multiple storage tiers leveraging online and nearline storage media (such as SCSI, SATA and tape).
Automated data migration—Grid Access Manager Software can automate the movement of data from obsolete resources to new resources—reducing or eliminating manual, disruptive data-migration projects.
Open, standards-based access—With support for industry-standard interfaces (including CIFS and NFS) and protocols (such as HTTP), Grid Access Manager Software enables organizations to implement an enterprise fixed-content-storage strategy.
Proactive monitoring and management—Grid Access Manager Software is designed to reduce the cost of management by continuously monitoring the health of the system, including storage, servers and network, and proactively alerts administrators if issues arise. Administrators can monitor and manage the grid from across the network using the single-pane, Web-based management console. Administrators can track CPU, network, storage resources and digital data assets using the 120 customizable alerts and more than 500 on-demand reports.
Exceptional performance—Grid Access Manager Software employs data streaming, caching and the power of grid architecture to deliver a fast, responsive storage system. Grid Access Manager Software implements a fast data-streaming mechanism to deliver data. To improve performance, Grid Access Manager Software load-balances requests based on storage tier, CPU and network bandwidth.
The Distributed Gateway (optional) based on IBM GPFS™ increases the scalability and performance of the file-system front end for the Grid, allowing NAS capability for transactional as well as archive data. (General Availability April 10, 2009)
Data Protection & Business Continuity
Grid Access Manager Software supports business continuity by creating multiple copies of data and automatically replicating them geographically or to different storage tiers based on customer rules so they are no longer vulnerable to potential issues. By supporting continuous operations even in the event of failure, Grid Access Manager Software provides automated recovery to help maintain business resiliency. The solution also supports continuous operation during hardware refreshes, capacity upgrades and data migration.
Data integrity protection—Grid Access Manager Software helps protect the integrity and authenticity of stored data using digital fingerprints. Data integrity is proactively monitored and verified when data is stored, replicated, restored and retrieved. Integrity checks can be performed on demand and if errors are encountered, Grid Access Manager Software can automatically create another replica from a known good copy.
High availability—Grid Access Manager Software provides a fault-tolerant, resilient and self-healing solution. Storage services can remain available even after hardware, storage and network failures occur or where entire sites are completely destroyed.
Automated recovery—In the event of site, storage or system failure, Grid Access Manager Software automates data recovery to fully restore the storage system to the original state. During this period, storage services continue to be available.
Multi Site Operation
Fast, enterprise-wide availability can be a challenge for traditional storage systems when transporting petabytes of data across sites that are linked with varying bandwidth networks. Grid Access Manager Software enables formation of archives that can scale to petabytes of data across hundreds of sites. Key enabling features include:
Object store with global name space—Grid Access Manager Software provides an object-based storage system that can scale to petabytes (capacity) and billions of objects (object count) in a single unified system that can span multiple sites and tiers. A global name space gives access to stored objects using globally unique object identifiers, which can be accessed from any grid resource—regardless of location or storage tier. This eliminates storage silos to enable efficient and effective multi-site access.
WAN-optimized replication—Grid Access Manager Software provides policy-based N-way data replication among sites and heterogeneous storage hardware. The replication semantics are highly optimized for WAN operation and designed to recover from congestion or link failure.
Grid Access Manager Software enables customers with single or multiple sites and with fixed content/reference data storage requirements to improve storage utilization and investment across sites by way of an enterprise-wide, fault-tolerant storage grid with real-time failover capabilities. Grid Access Manager Software can help protect enterprise data through automated replication, life-cycle management and digital signature functionality.
