Context

IBM® Tivoli® Storage Process Manager (ITSPM) takes a holistic view of the IT storage environment to facilitate and align storage management to the business objectives of an organization.

As a productivity tool, the IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager manages and coordinates simple and complex storage provisioning, configuration and incident management tasks to be completed by integrating people, process, information and technology and aligning them to industry best practices.

This portal-based solution helps customers implement a storage management process faster out of the box with a set of best-practice ITSM best practices flows, and coordinates and manages storage change, configuration and incident management throughout the life cycle through an easy-to-use interface. 

IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager integrates systems management tools into the process manager allowing customers to grow their processes at their own pace.

The IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager also includes a process to facilitate the identification and cleanup of files in the environment that do not belong on primary or tier one storage. It also provides the capability for customers to define service level objectives and capabilities for data and servers in the environment to facilitate tiered storage management. These policies will be presented when customers are performing change, configuration, release, problem, incident and service level management for data and storage in their environment.

IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager enables organizations to meet data and storage service level expectations by

1. Cost Reduction & Simplification
   • Enables cost savings and reduced TCO by reclaiming storage space and reducing redundancy.
   • Enables you to lower your total IT cost (hardware, software, people) by optimizing and aligning infrastructure with business objectives.
2. Improve effectiveness & efficiencies
   • Provides sustainable improvements in storage and information management efficiency
   • Enables you to make better use of the information you have
3. Manage Risk and Address Compliance
   • Intelligent information mapping of storage environment to the IT infrastructure and pertinent integrated search capabilities
   • Reduce the risk of Human Errors

Details

The IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager includes best-practice workflow templates for coordinating change, release and incident management activities and tasks around storage management.

Recognizing that many customers have well documented and functioning processes today, the IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager workflow templates are easily configurable at various levels. Using the underlying ITSM Dynamic Workflow Engine, Administrators can create new workflow templates for specific release types by adding or deleting activities and tasks from an existing workflow template. In addition, to support certain exception use cases, the workflow engine allows a specific instance of a storage management process workflow to be modified for 'just once' type execution.

Storage provisioning and configuration changes can be automated by connecting the implementation activity directly to the Operational Management Product (OMP) such as, Tivoli Productivity Center, Tivoli Configuration Manager, and Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Provisioning Manager to perform the operational task, monitor status of the task and verify completion of the task. Such connections are possible and extensible via the Integration Module (IM) methodology that is being incorporated into a variety of ITSM process managers

Storage provisioning and configuration changes can be planned and implemented on a predefined schedule or can be ad hoc to support unplanned emergency fixes and updates.

Obtaining More Information

For additional information, please contact your IBM Tivoli representative or read the web pages below:

IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/features/it-serv-mgmt/welcome/itsm-pro-accel.html