Storage Vendors Turn Focus to Disaster Recovery, Workflow Management

Major storage companies are working on new management tools that focus on disaster recovery and give users new options in workflow management, regulatory compliance and database management—all of which are tailored to specific hardware.

IBM is planning to launch in May Tivoli Intelligent ThinkDynamic Orchestrator for Tivoli Storage Resource Manager, officials of the Austin, Texas, division said last week. While most modern storage management suites layer graphical interfaces and scripts over legacy programs, Orchestrator adds workflow management, which lets computers check with humans, policies and other software before taking action, they said.

The software bundle will work with storage hardware that is standards-compliant, such as with Storage Management Initiative Specification 1.0, or that uses IBMs APIs, the officials said. Disaster recovery features such as reprovisioning will follow later next year, they added.

"I could see an advantage to using some of that stuff, if youre a big-enough environment. You may want different policies for the different servers, different policies for the different people," said Steve Stelzer, IT administrator at the University of Colorados Health Sciences group, in Denver. The groups data grows 20 percent annually and is backed up with Tivoli Storage Resource Manager.

"At first, [we thought] we have all this storage, this ought to last us forever. But every six months, its gone," Stelzer said. Adding artificial intelligence to the management software will help minimize that, he said.

In hardware, EMC Corp. is planning next quarter to resell OuterBay Technologies Inc.s Application Data Management 3.0 suite, officials of both companies confirmed. The move will let EMC customers administer Oracle Corp. databases while tables are being archived to EMCs ATA-based Centera storage. The process will use Application Data Managements tools to generate data subsets as well as for resource monitoring, archiving and development, said OuterBay CEO Michael Howard, in Campbell, Calif.

OuterBays software will also integrate with parts of EMCs ControlCenter suite.

Similarly, Network Appliance Inc.s FAS (Fabric Attached Storage) high-end series and its NearStore disk backup series will each get custom versions of Veritas Software Corp.s Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0, officials in Sunnyvale, Calif., said. That software, until last month known as Data Migrator, will also integrate with NetApps SnapLock WORM software, they said. Network Appliance will resell parts of Veritas NetBackup 5.0, such as the Advanced Client and Oracle agents, so that NetBackup can make use of NearStores snapshots and other features, rather than just seeing it as another disk array, they said.

The reselling of Data Lifecycle Manager and NetBackup components will begin in the first quarter of next year, with the SnapLock technologies due in the second half, officials said.

Other new storage software for 2004

Veritas CommandCentral Service with workflow management

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