Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning - Understanding IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning

4 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

1.1 IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center overview

The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is the first offering to be delivered as

part of the IBM TotalStorage Open Software Family. The IBM TotalStorage

Productivity Center is an open storage infrastructure management solution

designed to help reduce the effort of managing complex storage infrastructures,

to help improve storage capacity utilization, and to help increase administrative

efficiency. It is designed to enable storage infrastructure to have the ability to

respond to “on demand” storage needs.

IBM’s vision for on demand has at its heart, the automation and provisioning

strategies provided by products like IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager. The move

from “just-in-case” manual provisioning to “just-in-time” automated provisioning is

brought one major step closer. The IBM software product suite offers a

foundation for responding flexibly to internal and external changes and

streamlining business operations while dynamically aligning your IT resources

with your business priorities. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with

Advanced Provisioning does just that for your storage environment.

The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides an integration point for

storage and fabric management and replication. The IBM TotalStorage

Productivity Center user interface allows storage administrators to launch IBM

TotalStorage Open Software Family products, which help to support managing

the storage volume lifecycle, device configuration, performance, replication,

storage network fabric, data backup, data availability, and data recovery, as well

as enterprise policies for managing host, application, database, and filesystem

data.

The integration point which IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides is a

“launchpad” which is designed to simplify storage administration by providing a

task-based organization to the broad range of capability available with the

TotalStorage Open Software Family products. Next we’ll talk about which

products are provided with this offering and look at the basic architecture.

From a high level, the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced

Provisioning offering can be broken into two pieces. The first piece is the IBM

TotalStorage Productivity Center, which is composed of three products:

򐂰 IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager

򐂰 IBM Tivoli SAN Manager

򐂰 IBM TotalStorage Multiple Device Manager

Chapter 1. Introduction 5

The second piece, the “advanced provisioning”, adds the move toward

automation with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager. IBM Tivoli Provisioning

Manager is key to the new automation solutions from IBM. It uses best practices

to automate complex IT processes including deploying servers and software,

allocating storage and configuring networks. This, in turn, will lead to reducing

overall cost and cutting the potential for human error. IBM Tivoli Provisioning

Manager is the next step towards policy-based automatic reconfiguration. This

offering focuses on the storage provisioning capabilities of the product.

Figure 1-1 provides an overview of the included products for these offerings:

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center

with Advanced Provisioning

Figure 1-1 Offering overview

Figure 1-2 depicts the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced

Provisioning in this context within your storage environment. It shows the

components and basic interactions with agents, hardware, and other products

that comprise the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced

Provisioning offering. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center manages the agents

and communication to the storage devices, while IBM Tivoli Provisioning

Manager communicates with the various components of IBM TotalStorage

Productivity Center to provide the automated provisioning.

IBM Tivoli

Provisioning

Manager

IBM Tivoli

Storage

Resource

Manager

IBM Tivoli

SAN

Manager

IBM

TotalStorage

Multiple

Device

Manager

Replication

Manager

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning

IBM

TotalStorage

Multiple

Device

Manager

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center

6 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

Figure 1-2 A typical IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center configuration

In sum, the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is designed to help to improve:

򐂰 Administrator efficiency

򐂰 Capacity utilization

򐂰 SAN performance

򐂰 Application availability

In addition to these benefits, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides all of

the capabilities you need to manage your storage environment, including these:

򐂰 Managing and configuring your SAN attached storage devices

򐂰 Monitoring and tracking the performance of SAN attached SMI-S compliant

storage devices

򐂰 Managing the capacity utilization and availability of file systems and

databases

Managed

Host

(Agents)

IBM Multiple Device Manager

Tivoli Storage Area Network Manager

Tivoli Storage Resource Manager

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center

Tivoli Provisioning Manager

with storage workflows

Database

Managed

Host

(Agents)

Managed

Host

(Agents)

SAN

ESS ICAT

Enterprise

Storage

Server

FAStT CIMOM

FAStT

Storage

Server

Database