Creating an agile storage infrastructure with TotalStorage Productivity Center v3.3

IBM's promise to virtualization customers has always been simple: We can help you consolidate, simplify, and economize your data center.

That promise rings as true as ever with the latest version of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC). The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is an open storage infrastructure management solution designed to help simplify management of complex storage infrastructure, automate manual storage tasks to improve administrative efficiency, and optimize storage capacity utilization through virtualization and other means. It is designed to create an agile storage infrastructure that can grow with a business and respond to on-demand storage needs.

In its newest iteration, TotalStorage Productivity Center v3.3 now offers many enhancements to give data center managers a fuller understanding of their storage needs and performance as well as the tools to manage it. Few solutions hold as much promise for simplifying storage in your data center as TPC v3.3.

The challenge that many data center administrators confront is the complexity of their storage environments. As technology has advanced and senior managers have questioned IT budgets more closely, price has become an increasingly pivotal factor in IT spending decisions. As a result, data storage networks, just like environments for servers and network management systems, have become heterogeneous with hardware from numerous vendors, multiple storage media, and various fabric switches.

Addressing Common Challenges
While the heterogeneous storage environment has enabled IT administrators to stretch their IT acquisition dollars, in practice businesses have paid a hidden, and often greater cost in two ways. First, the heterogeneous storage environment has greatly complicated the management and maintenance of storage systems and required significant investments of time and talent to upgrade systems and keep them operational. In addition, the resulting complexity has obscured the ability of IT administrators to get an accurate picture of key issues, such as utilization rates, performance, and failure identification and isolation.

This lack of visibility into their storage environments has often left IT administrators flying blind and relying on intuition when trying to troubleshoot unplanned outages and performance below what Service Level Agreements stipulate.

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center addresses these challenges by serving as your single point of management for the heterogeneous storage infrastructure—disk, data, and fabric. TotalStorage Productivity Center creates a single dashboard that assesses availability, assets, capacity, and performance management within your storage environment, both physical and virtualized.

The TotalStorage Productivity Center features four principal components:

• The TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data collects and analyzes data, both file systems and block data (databases) and supports multi-vendor disk arrays. This component creates data reports that IT administrators can use in new ways, such as enabling chargebacks to business lines based on their actual use of data storage.
• TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk, including virtualization support, delivers performance management for disk subsystems, not only IBM systems but other vendors' systems as well. This component also features a volume performance advisor and storage provisioning capability.
• TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric provides an easy-to-understand, complete overview of the SAN, including event reporting, performance measurements, zone control, and support for heterogeneous fabric.
• Finally, there is the TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication. This is a single point-of-control for point-in-time and remote volume replication services. It features automated source-target matching.

In keeping with IBM's commitment to deliver long-term value to customers, TotalStorage Productivity Center v3.3 has included support for the latest industry storage management standard, known as Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) Client suite. Having SMI-S embedded in both software and hardware enables businesses to simplify their day-to-day storage management and provisioning responsibilities.

Businesses today demand that flexibility and interoperability in their heterogeneous storage environments. Leveraging storage standards empowers customers to maintain a competitive edge in their businesses by giving them the ability to change systems, vendors, and development strategies as needed to control scalability, reliability, security, connectivity, and all other critical aspects of their core business. IBM continues to lead the industry in this regard.

Bringing Real Value to Your Storage Infrastructure
"TotalStorage Productivity Center creates a single dashboard that assesses availability, assets, capacity, and performance management with in your storage environment, both physical and virtualized."

The value of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center becomes evident in several ways. First and foremost, it enables end-to-end storage management with a single tool. Storage configuration management can extend across the SAN while centralizing storage management. Secondly, businesses can use TotalStorage Productivity Center to improve storage utilization, performance, and service levels, because the manager has end-to-end views of the SAN topology and possesses the tools to manage it. In addition, TotalStorage Productivity Center enhances the efficiency of the IT by reducing complexity. Host usage can be tracked across host file systems, databases, and storage. And, finally, TotalStorage Productivity Center ties to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for complete information life cycle management.

With estimates indicating that the amount of storage needs are growing 50% a year for some businesses, the cost of hardware is going down, but the cost of ownership is rising. Against this backdrop, business leaders can grasp the importance of making certain their storage environment is optimized for efficiency and performance.

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center makes it possible to scan all systems and identify areas where capacity is constrained and an excess exists. Moreover, TotalStorage Productivity Center allows managers to slice and dice the attributes of their storage system from an array of 300 reports.

Industry analyst Gartner, Inc., has given IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center high marks in its report titled Magic Quadrant for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software, for its ability to execute the completeness of the vision behind it. Calling it "relatively easy to use and deploy" compared with competing solutions, Gartner said TotalStorage Productivity Center "provides broad platform support" and "handles the challenges of displaying large-scale environments."

Current IBM customers won't be surprised by those comments. After all, IBM's broad scope of products and services—everything from server hardware to virtualization to enterprise management—have given it unique capabilities and a deep understanding of customer pain points that have long differentiated its offerings from those of industry competitors. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is one more proof point of that leadership.