Storage Toolkit

Big Blue's storage tag team

Ed Frauenheim CNET News.com

Published: 19 Feb 2004 15:09 GMT

It's not the usual procedure at IBM, but when it comes to data-storage software, Laura Sanders and Bruce Hillsberg share responsibility for running the show.

Sanders is vice president of storage-management products in the company's Tivoli software unit, which makes products for monitoring and managing storage equipment. On the hardware side, Hillsberg directs storage-software strategy and technology in Big Blue's systems group.

Storage software has become increasingly important to organisations eager to increase the utilisation rate of their gear and trim personnel costs through automation. What's more, the storage industry has been talking up the concept of information lifecycle management, or ILM. That involves software that moves data from one type of storage device to another, as it becomes less valuable or needs to be permanently archived to meet a legal requirement.

The Tivoli brand stems from IBM's acquisition of Tivoli Systems in 1996. Meanwhile, the hardware side has been working on its own software technology. Sanders and Hillsberg recently discussed IBM's take on information lifecycle management and what they believe is shaping demand for storage.

Q: You have not made a big deal out of information lifecycle management. Is that conscious, or are you planning to do something along those lines?
Hillsberg: From our perspective, we have been doing this for decades on the mainframe. HSM [hierarchical storage management, which refers to putting data on different classes of storage gear] has been part of the ZOS offering for some time now.

We have been providing this for some time for our customers, both in the mainframe and in the open systems environment. Is it important? Yes, but it is a piece of the solution. What we are trying to do is help customers create more of this on-demand view of the world. Making sure that your data is in the right place is one aspect of it, but there are other aspects equally as important -- things like improving application availability.

So when I go mess around with that storage, or something comes off-lease, I don't have to take down my mission-critical applications to do that. It's also key to implement the intelligence in the system so that, if I am managing a thousand servers and all that associated storage, I don't have to have people worrying about Bruce creating a file on the right piece of storage.

We continue to invest heavily in TSM [Tivoli Storage Manager]. We have made some recent changes to make it work well with some of these compliance regulations, but we already have laid the base.