Special Section: SNW, Fall 2004 - Highlights From The SNW Floor:

IBM UNLEASHES NEXT GENERATION STORAGE SOFTWARE FOR EMC SYSTEMS

IBM announced new storage automation and IBM Virtualization Engine technologies to help enable clients to simplify their infrastructure. The next generation IBM TotalStorage Open Software Family was designed to help improve productivity, enhance application availability, and optimize system resources and utilization.

"As the second largest software company in the world, IBM continues to introduce new technology breakthroughs enabling clients to get the most out of their heterogeneous storage environment," said Laura Sanders, vice president of IBM TotalStorage Open Software. "[The] announcement extends our lead in storage virtualization and automation, and complements IBM's broad range of disk, tape and storage networking solutions."

With end users looking for ways to improve resource productivity and availability, IBM is delivering new infrastructure simplification, business continuity and information lifecycle management solutions. The new advances in IBM's TotalStorage Open Software products announced today include:

• IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller v1.2.1 -- This software can now support more diverse storage environments by attaching to EMC's Symmetrix DMX Series, as well as new support for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Virtual Arrays and the IBM TotalStorage DS8000 and DS6000. The solution can also work with many arrays from Hitachi Data Systems. While some storage companies have not yet delivered virtualization capabilities, IBM is already on its fourth generation of this virtualization solution with wide support for all tier one major vendors.

Now managing even larger storage environments, SAN Volume Controller doubles the cluster size to eight nodes to deliver twice the performance (up to 560K I/O per second) and quadruples the number of supported virtual disks (4096 virtual disks per cluster) available to host applications. SAN Volume Controller also provides increased replication capabilities for global mirroring through the CNT UltraNet Replication Appliance.

• IBM TotalStorage SAN File System v2.2 -- Delivering new information lifecycle management capabilities, SAN File System can enable policy-based movement and deletion of files among various tiers of storage, providing the ability to match the value of data to the appropriate class of storage. Further strengthened security permissions can enable flexible, heterogeneous file sharing among Windows, Linux and UNIX environments.

Providing additional scalability and interoperability to help clients manage more diverse storage environments, SAN File System also expands host support, including the ability to extend SAN File System capabilities to the IP network that can enable increased data storage flexibility and improved access for data sharing.

• IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center 2.1 -- This integrated storage infrastructure management suite provides new features to help clients improve installation, tighten integration with other TotalStorage Open Software products and enhance reporting flexibility. Direct integration with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can allow users to easily set policies to automatically trigger Tivoli Storage Manager to backup or archive identified files in order to automatically meet current protection or retention policies. A new centralized installation process can allow customers to deploy the suite from a common point, helping clients reduce complexity and improve time to value. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center 2.1 also offers a common agent across the suite, new reporting capabilities and additional platform and device support.

• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.3 -- A major upgrade for this powerful storage management software family delivers enhanced ease of use, improved performance and enhanced application support. A new graphical user interface, installation and configuration tools, and a new administrative center can help significantly reduce administrative time. Additional enhancements can improve backup and recovery performance, can provide higher levels of data integrity, and can improve disk and tape storage efficiency. Optional Tivoli Storage Manager components provide new levels of application support for email, database, enterprise resource planning and hierarchical storage management.

"For Carolinas HealthCare System, storage software is playing a critical role in helping us optimize our environment," said Craig Richardville, vice president of information services for Carolinas HealthCare System. "We are deploying IBM's TotalStorage Open Software family to provide the required flexibility and availability for our clinical applications. Our end-to-end storage solutions range from virtualization to IBM's latest storage infrastructure management software."