Features - Storage Innovations:

IBM FURTHERS IT AUTOMATION WITH ADVANCED STORAGE PROVISIONING

IBM announced IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning, integrated software that automates and simplifies manual storage capacity provisioning. The new solution helps organizations automate at their own pace and reduces the amount of valuable time required to provision additional capacity to keep up with growing storage demands.

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning ties together individual storage provisioning tasks into a series of flexible, automated workflows. This results in a fast and repeatable method of provisioning storage resources and reduces the possibility of human error. Enterprises can also customize these workflows to accommodate their own unique needs and business policies as well as build in manual checkpoints for monitoring the provisioning process.

For example, an insurance company with end of month peaks in its storage demands can use TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning to execute a customized workflow which automatically executes all the steps necessary to provision additional storage volume on the last day of each month. This reduces the work associated with provisioning storage volume from a series of manual tasks to one simple, automated action.

"With IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning, traditional manual tasks that require up to 50 steps and take days to complete can now be reduced dramatically," said Laura Sanders, vice president of IBM TotalStorage Open Software. "By consolidating cross-discipline processes into simple workflows, enterprises using the solution can increase efficiency and help save time and money while moving toward an on demand storage environment."

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning consists of the recently introduced IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center combined with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, a product that automatically provisions and configures servers, operating systems, middleware, applications, storage capacity and network devices. The combined package provides a central point of control to monitor and maintain storage and data center systems and allows for the automation of manual provisioning and deployment of both servers and storage.