IBM Corp. subsidiary Tivoli Systems Inc. unveiled a management framework designed to weave data storage more tightly into the fabric of enterprise business applications.
At the core of Tivoli’s Information Integrity Initiative are the soon-to-be-integrated Tivoli Storage Management and Tivoli Enterprise applications and systems management software.
With the run-up to the September release of Tivoli Storage Management 4.0, the company is phasing in closer integration of its key management software.
By bringing storage management into the enterprise systems management fold, Tivoli allows users to correlate through a single view both centralized mass storage and far-flung pockets of data with business applications and network information, according to company officials.
“This integration allows to get a view of how your IT assets interact together and how they affect your business processes. It’s not just seeing whether a server is up or down, but having a view of the business process affected,” said Philip Mendoza, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.
“Having their framework and storage management in place means that if you have the Tivoli Global Event Manager, it allows you to tie a picture together of all of your IT assets — storage, systems, and applications and networking, across multiple platforms, from mainframes to Unix to NT,” Mendoza said.
Tivoli Storage Management — the former IBM AdStar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) — is a multi-platform, centralized storage management facility for backup, archiving, storage management, and disaster recovery functions.
By linking its storage management software and its flagship Tivoli Enterprise management tools, Tivoli aims to add storage devices and subsystems to the range of assets handled by the business policy-based and rules-based Tivoli Enterprise management schemes. It also aims to improve disaster recovery services, provide storage area networks (SAN) capabilities, and extend storage management throughout distributed and mobile computing configurations, according to company officials.
As part of the Tivoli Storage Management upgrade, the company has added SAN management features, including multi-vendor tape pooling and LAN-free backup, and will later provide disk and data sharing, according to the company.
The Tivoli Storage Management system, which is currently shipping, will be updated over the next three months to implement the new initiative. Pricing varies according to platform and configuration.