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One thing holds true in the modern storage environment—data fills all available space. And as organizations across all industries are adding daily to the mountains of customer data, financial records, e-mails, images and other electronic content, many are realizing that these heaps of data are actually driving every decision and process throughout the enterprise.
Not all data is created equal, however, and deriving business value from information dispersed over many different sources means integrating, analyzing and optimizing heterogeneous types and sources of information throughout its lifecycle. This type of Information On Demand strategy can help companies create new business insight and manage risk—key advantages for businesses faced with increased regulatory and global competitive pressures. Yet many companies are overwhelmed by the explosion of data growth and lack storage management strategies and disciplines to ensure effective disk utilization. Many are uncertain about what should be kept or deleted, resulting in unnecessary expense, access delays and high retrieval costs. And with many experts predicting exponential data growth rates, efficiently managing and protecting information assets continue to be huge challenges for IT departments. And, managing storage service levels is a growing requirement that will require better organization of the storage to reflect different service level requirements.
Increasingly, customers want to organize their storage environment into tiers of storage based on the value of the data.
IBM tiered storage aligns data value and storage cost in a three stage process
To help companies meet this challenge, IBM has designed information lifecycle management solutions for the process of managing information—from creation to disposal—in a manner that aligns cost with the changing value of information. As part of this portfolio of products, the IBM tiered storage solution made up of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager deployed together creates an architecture for managing data growth and introduces highly automated practices. This helps lower manual intervention costs and reduces risks.
By classifying and segmenting data into a multi-tiered structure, companies can create services and service level policies that support each tier and leverage IBM storage software to not only structure the tiers but also do operational management once the tiers are established. This involves three stages:
Stage 1—Classify and rationalize data
Stage 2—Establish storage tiers
Stage 3—Determine policies to manage data
To help you through each stage of this process, IBM provides powerful, proven tools that fully integrate to simplify your architecture and effectively consolidate resources.
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center jumpstarts data classification in Stage 1
For the first stage of the tiered storage approach, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides a single management platform to manage performance, availability and capacity of your storage infrastructure. TotalStorage Productivity Center offers centralized management from a single console, which allows you to monitor, plan, configure, troubleshoot and report on the storage environment.
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center can help centralize the management of each tier, measure capacity growth and monitor service levels. Working with IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager, Productivity Center also can help automate operational management tasks and provide important information about the storage capacity and storage infrastructure to other management tools customers use.
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center enables you to classify data, pool this data with IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller and clean up storage files based on pre-established policies. This helps you align ownership and access authorization in accordance with security policies, then determine the business value and service level of specific data so it can be placed appropriately and moved if the status later changes.
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller simplifies tiered storage in Stage 2
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller can help simplify storage infrastructure through virtualization of both IBM and non-IBM products and establish storage tiers that can be provisioned to applications and users as needed. Because tiered storage infrastructures commonly include different types of storage, often from different vendors, this ability is crucial to organizing the environment. Provisioning virtualized tiers of storage can help companies match data storage requirements and costs with existing investments in SAN fabric.
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