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

48 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

3.1 IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager (ITSRM) is an active, intelligent,

business-centric management solution for storage resources across the

enterprise. IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager enables administrators to

visualize their distributed storage network, establish management policies, and

report on resource utilization. Enterprise storage resource management (SRM)

must support heterogeneous storage environments, integrate with current and

future technologies, and enable policy based automation to simplify

administration. IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager is intended to reduce

system costs, improve return on investment, and reduce the risk of application

downtime.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager is an intelligent tool for your storage

environment that provides a set of policy-driven automated tools for managing

storage capacity, availability, events, performance and assets in your enterprise

environment, including NetWare, Network Attached Storage (NAS), Serial

Storage Architecture (SSA), Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), and Microsoft

Cluster Server technologies, as well as RDBMSs such as Oracle, Sybase SQL

Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Universal Database (UDB) DB2.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager can help you identify, evaluate, control

and predict problems with your enterprise storage management assets. Also,

because it is policy-based, through its autonomic self-healing capabilities, it can

detect potential problems and automatically make adjustments based on the

policies and actions you have established.

Figure 3-1 shows the IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager’s interface.

Chapter 3. Components 49

Figure 3-1 IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager interface

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager’s user interface (UI) uses a familiar

tree-based navigation system. This system allows you to see a hierarchical

organization of the product and its features in the left pane of the interface while

viewing detailed reports and charts in the right pane.

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Figure 3-2 IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager dashboard

Figure 3-2 shows the IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager dashboard. This is

the default right-hand pane display when you start IBM Tivoli Storage Resource

Manager and displays a helpful summary of the overall health of the storage

environment. It can quickly show you any potential problem areas for further

investigation. The dashboard contains four displayable areas and seven panels

that you can cycle through to view your environment’s storage information.

IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager monitors the storage assets throughout

your enterprise, watching for predefined events to occur and alerting you to

potential problems by E-mail or through a pager, before they occur. For example,

it can notify you when your system is running out of disk space or warn you of

impending storage hardware failure. By alerting you to these and other issues

related to your stored data, it enables you to prevent unnecessary system and

application downtime.

3.1.1 Features and advantages

The primary business purpose of Tivoli Storage Resource Manager is to help the

storage administrator keep data available to applications so your organization

can cut costs and ultimately produce revenue.