Originally posted by: TonyPearson

It's Tuesday again, and that means one thing.... IBM Announcements! On the heels of [last week's announcements], IBM announced some additional products of interest to storage administrators.

IBM Information Archive

Back in 2008, IBM [unveiled the Information Archive]. This storage solution provides automated policy-based tiering between disk and tape, with non-erasable non-rewriteable enforcement to protect against unethical tampering of data. The initial release supported [both files and object storage], with support for different collections, each with its own set of policies for management. However, it only supported NFS initially for the file protocol. Today, IBM announces the addition of CIFS protocol support, which will be especially helpful in healthcare and life sciences, as much of the medical equipment is designed for CIFS protocol storage.

Also, Information Archive will now provide a full index and search feature capability to help with e-Discovery. Searches and retrievals can be done in the background without disrupting applications or the archiving operations.

To learn more, read the [announcement letter].

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments V6.2 extends capabilities that currently exist in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. TSM backup/archive clients run fine on guest operating systems, but now this new extension improves backup for VMware environments. TSM provides incremental block-level backups utilizing VMware's vStorage APIs for Data Protection and Changed Block Tracking features.

To minimize impact to the VMware host, TSM for VE make use of non-disruptive snapshots and offload the backup processing to a vStorage backup server. This supports file-level recovery, volume-level recovery, and full VM recovery. Of course, since it is based on TSM v6, you get advanced storage efficiency features such as compression and deduplication to minimize consumption of disk storage pools.

To learn more, see the [announcement letter].

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers V6.2.3

IBM Tivoli Monitor has been extended to support virtual servers, including VMware, Linux KVM, and Citrix XenServer. This can help with capacity planning, performance monitoring, and availability. Tivoli Monitor will help you understand the relationships between physical and virtual resources to help isolate problems to the correct resource, reducing the time it takes for debug issues between servers and storage. See the [announcement letter].

Next week is [IBM Pulse2011 Conference] in Las Vegas, February 27 to March 2. Sorry, I don't plan to be there this year. It is looking to be a great conference, with fellow inventor Dean Kamen as the keynote speaker. For a blast from the past, read my blog posts from Pulse2008 [Main Tent sessions] and [Breakout sessions].

technorati tags: IBM, #ibmpulse, Information Archive, Tivoli, TSM, Tivoli Monitor, VMware, LInux, KVM, Citrix, XenServer