Virtualization to Aid IBM Storage Control

New storage products from IBM and its Tivoli software division will help users achieve self-managing data in the future, company officials said last week.

The latest hardware and software include a virtualization appliance and monitoring/reporting applications. Details of the upcoming StorageTank file system were also announced, with all the products being linked by the Common Information Model for agnostic third-party integration.

IBMs new SAN Volume Controller gives high-end customers control of disparate storage as a single pool. It combines home-grown software with Linux-based IBM servers and will ship July 25, starting at $60,000. A version later this year will support unspecified non-IBM storage, officials said.

Quality-of-service, security and utilization reporting are some of SAN Volume Controllers features. Snapshot and replication software are optional. The appliance connects to the network, not to hosts, but a version running directly on a storage switch is being considered for the future.

The Road to Self-Managed Storage This month Automated monitoring/reporting July 25 Virtualization appliance for IBM Later this year Version for other vendors December StorageTank file system

Users running Tivoli Storage Manager software, meanwhile, will get new monitoring and reporting features through a free upgrade later this month. The downloadable new feature, Data Protection Monitor, lets users exploit canned or custom-built SQL queries, which can be exported to Web pages, officials said.

An updated version of the tool, due later this year, will include SQL templates, reporting granularity in minutes instead of hours, and summaries for specific nodes. However, the ability for users to respond to problems through the feature isnt on the road map, they said.

"Ive been kind of waiting for some reporting utility from Tivoli. The one they used to have didnt do much," said Bruce Kamp, midrange systems analyst at Memorial Healthcare System, in Hollywood, Fla. MHS backs up daily about 300GB of servers and databases to tape via a disk cache for speed. Management software will be important as MHS moves to a SAN (storage area network) this fall, Kamp said.

In December, IBM will ship its long-awaited SAN File System, known as StorageTank. The oft-delayed product will combine hardware and software to aggregate file systems across the servers connected to a SAN, officials said.