Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Capacity Management
  •   Model and Size Capacity Requirements

Details

Today, many companies are only just beginning to recognize the challenges that meeting these key elements pose for existing IT architectures and IT organizations. In their continued effort to meet the sometimes conflicting cost, service-level, business continuity, and new application demands of business executives, IT managers need to adopt a new strategy for deploying server and storage solutions. These new solutions must provide better performance, higher reliability, greater capacity, and lower cost of operations while making it easier to reuse existing assets and provision new systems as needed.

The IBM® TotalStorage Productivity Center is an integrated storage infrastructure management suite designed to help simplify and automate the management of storage devices, storage networks, and capacity utilization of file systems and databases.

TotalStorage Productivity Center helps you manage the capacity utilization of storage systems, file systems and databases and automate file-system capacity provisioning, perform device configuration and management of multiple devices from a single user interface, tune and proactively manage the performance of storage devices on the SAN and manage, monitor and control your SAN fabric.

TotalStorage Productivity Center is comprised of the following four products:

1. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data provides over 300 enterprise wide reports, monitoring and alerts, policy-based action and file-system capacity automation in a heterogeneous environment. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data is designed to help improve capacity utilization of file systems and databases and to add intelligence to data protection and retention practices.
   • With TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data, you can meet the challenges of an on demand environment with customizable storage-management policies. It is designed to provide a single interface to manage storage assets. It provides a suite of tools to help enterprises to identify, evaluate, control, and predict storage usage. It also is designed to enable management of key aspects of the storage infrastructure: capacity, assets, events and availability. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data offers active, policy-based management for an automated, self-healing approach to storage resource management.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data also includes asset management and business unit chargeback capabilities, enabling you to align your storage infrastructure with business objectives and manage storage as an internal, application-driven utility.
2. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric is designed to provide automated device discovery, topology rendering, error detection and fault isolation, SAN error predictor, zone control, real-time monitoring and alerts, and event management for heterogeneous enterprise SAN environments. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric is designed to help simplify the management and improve the availability of the SAN environment.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric is designed to provide automatic device discovery and allows multiple SAN views, including physical, logical, and zone views. Because administrators are able to gather configuration, network statistics, and other status information from switches, they can view and analyze multiple aspects of the storage environment, including capacity, utilization, assets, and availability. Administrators can use this information to determine which systems, for example, are approaching maximum capacity and which systems are near minimums, so that they can perform load balancing as needed. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric monitoring capability is designed to detect storage events and generate the appropriate alerts to the administrator.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric also is designed to provide a number of SAN availability features, including SAN error protector. An autonomic computing capability, SAN error predictor is designed to help predict SAN network problems before they become severe and impact data and application availability. This functionality incorporates predictive failure analysis into the storage network environment, designed to allow administrators to be proactive in managing SAN availability.
3. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk is designed to enable device configuration and management of SAN-attached devices from a single console. In addition, it also includes performance capabilities to help monitor and manage the performance of the disks on the devices. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk is designed to help simplify the complexity of managing multiple SAN-attached storage devices.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk is designed to provide an IT administrator with a single, integrated console for the performance management of a SAN File System, SAN Volume Controller, and ESS. It is also designed to allow administrators to monitor metrics, such as I/O rates and cache utilization, and support optimization of storage through the identification of the best LUNs. It is designed to store received performance statistics into database tables for later use, and analyze and generate reports on monitored devices for display in the IBM Director Console.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Disk also assists in configuring performance thresholds for the devices that are based on performance metrics and the generation of alerts when those thresholds are exceeded. The IBM Director Event Action Planner can then be configured to trigger actions from these events.
4. TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication is designed to help simplify copy services management for ESS. It is also designed to provide configuration and management of the FlashCopy and Synchronous Metro Mirror capabilities of the ESS.
   • Data replication is a core function that is required for data protection and disaster recovery. The TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication is designed to control and monitor copy services operations in storage environments. It also provides advanced copy services functions for supported storage subsystems on the SAN.
   • TotalStorage Productivity Center for Replication can help administrators to keep data on multiple related volumes consistent across storage subsystems. It also performs "freeze-and-go" functions with consistency on multiple pairs when an error occurs during a replication operation.
   • TPC for Replication delivers configuration assistance by automating the source-to-target pairing setup, as well as monitoring and tracking the replication operations. It also helps automate the mapping of source volumes to target volumes, allowing a group of source volumes to be automatically mapped to a pool of target volumes.

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is designed to help you improve storage infrastructure availability, optimize storage resource utilization, enhance storage personnel productivity, and add intelligence to your data protection practices.

For More Information

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