A Look at IBM Storage Software
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Wed, Aug 11, 2010 @ 08:46 AM
When you think “storage software,” you probably don’t think “IBM” out of the gate. Other companies such as HP have taken the lead in storage management while IBM has focused on other priorities.
That said, IBM does have a couple of useful solutions to offer, especially if you find yourself in a relatively homogenous IBM environment. IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM Information Archive are two of the solutions you should become familiar with. They offer you compelling storage solutions at a reasonable value.
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC)
IBMs SVC is better than ever. Today, the software utilizes a high-performance storage engine to give you as much as twice the throughput of previous SVC solutions. Today, SVC is highly scalable and has integrated support for SSDs (Solid State Drives), letting you have the kind of high-end storage performance you need for your critical application data.
IBM SVC now also includes support for iSCSI server attachments. This will help to reduce your storage costs, in that you don’t have to rely on fibre channel HBA or switch ports any longer.
The IBM Tivoli FlashCopy Manager lets you integrate the replication functions of SVC with your major server software. This allows you to enjoy reduced backup and recovery times, and it will also improve the availability of your applications.
SVC also features improved replication functions. Reverse FlashCopy helps you to recover from disk backups with greater speed. Multi-Cluster Mirror lets you implement your consolidated disaster recovery strategies with ease.
IBM Information Archive
IBM also has a solution offering aimed at the broader market. IBM Information Archive is designed to act as a “universal archiving repository” to hold the data in midsize businesses and enterprises. IBM Information Archive helps to reduce information management costs, mitigate risks and make sure the organization is compliant with retention needs, whether they are business needs, regulatory needs or legal needs.
IBM Information Archive lets you leverage your various tiers of storage through all levels, be they disk, tape or other. You use IBM Information Archive to create a policy-based management configuration that will automatically move your less active information to your most cost-effective storage media.
In addition IBM Information Archive used both deduplication and compression to not only increase your storage capacity, but to optimize it and to improve the productivity of your organization.
IBM storage software solutions are robust enough to meet the needs of many businesses. If you’re looking for storage management software and you operate in a primarily IBM environment, you should look into both IBM SVC and IBM Information Archive.
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