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
  •   Supervise Tuning and Capacity Delivery

Details

Today, more than ever, e-business environments need to have continuous access to data and support tremendous growth, all while keeping an eye on the bottom line. This need means that storage administrators must improve storage utilization, reduce storage costs, manage more storage with the same staff, and ensure application availability.

The IBM® TotalStorage® Productivity Center (TPC) 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 help increase administrative efficiency. It is designed to enable storage infrastructure to have the ability to respond to on demand storage needs.

The primary business purpose of TPC for Data is to help the storage administrator keep data available to application so the company can produce revenue.

Through monitoring, analyzing, and reporting, TPC for Data helps the storage administrator prevent outages in the storage infrastructure. Armed with timely information, the storage administrator can take action to keep storage and data available to the application. TPC for Data also helps to make the most efficient use of storage budgets by allowing administrators to use their existing storage more efficiently, and more accurately predict future storage growth.

As soon as TPC for Data is installed, it can be configured to define and enforce storage policies through user-defined alerts, quotas, and constraints, notifying the user by e-mail, pager, the event log, or a systems management console for events such as when a quota has been exceeded or a constraint violated. However, finding a problem is not enough. You need a way to find and fix problems, or potential problems, as they are discovered.

TPC for Data can provide automated solutions through event management. Alerts, quotas that have been exceeded, or constraints that have been violated can result in notification or action, enabling the user to fix or even prevent storage outages. For example, if TPC for Data discovers data that has not been accessed in more than a year, it can trigger Tivoli® Storage Manager or another archive utility.

TPC for Data can automate file system extension capability, which can allow the user to specify a policy to automatically extend a file system when a threshold has been reached. For example, if the threshold of a file system is set at 78 percent and, through monitoring, TPC for Data identifies that this threshold has been exceeded, it can automatically initiate a file system extension to reduce the possibility of a storage-related outage. The feature supports both manual and automated initiated extension. When you are comfortable with the manual process, you can turn over all the steps to TPC for Data. The policy is set through a file system extension policy panel. A probe will run on agents and send file system statistics to the server. The server will compare the current file system statistics against the policy, and invoke provisioning and extension as necessary.

Figure 1. Policy-based disk quota management

File sweep is another feature of TPC for Data. TPC for Data can automatically invoke Tivoli Storage Manager to archive and delete files. This can free up space in a file system and can allow you to more effectively manage storage utilization. For example, a policy can be created to archive all files over 365 days old to tape using Tivoli Storage Manager, and then delete the files to free up the disk space.

Representing integration with Tivoli Systems Management solutions, TPC for Data can use the Event Integration Facility (EIF) to send messages to the Tivoli Enterprise Console. This action can allow Tivoli Enterprise Console to consider TPC for Data alerts in causal analysis for problems. Tivoli Enterprise Console will be added as a destination for alerts, in addition to SNMP Trap, and Windows Event Log. Those events can trigger to open incident, problem and change report management to a service desk for further investigating or planning.

In this figure, the dashboard shows a concise, yet detailed overview of the health of your storage environment. It enables you to quickly point out potential problem areas that need further investigation.

Figure 2: The Enterprise-wide summary dashboard

For more information

For more information about this tool, go to the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center page.