Information On Demand

In today's competitive and growing businessmanipulated more easily than numerous individual
environment, information is an increasingly valuable,physical disk and tape devices. Virtualization can
but costly organizational asset.further improve resource utilization, simplify storage
The volume of information is growing very rapidly inmanagement and accelerate application deployment
most organizations and the need to protect andwith improved resource sharing
manage information also continues to increase.Automated Management
Organizations are seeking to minimize risk, reduceUnderstanding the environment and managing it
costs, and increase flexibility by aligning ITcost-effectively is essential and IBM's automated
investments according to information value andmanagement software can help doing that. IBM
business needs.storage management products help with
With information on demand, business can respondunderstanding how storage is configured and used
with flexibility and speed to customer requirementsand in easily making changes to improve the storage
and market opportunity.network. Many tasks - such as provisioning new
Getting there involves three aspects:storage - can be simplified to a single step using our
· Infrastructure Simplification (IS): Simplificationadvanced automated management software.
of the underlying IT infrastructure and itsBusiness Continuity
management to lower the cost and complexity.The business climate in today's on demand era is
· Business Continuity (BC): Assuring security andhighly competitive. Customers, employees, suppliers
durability of information.and business partners expect to be able to tap into
· 3. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM):your information at any hour of the day from any
Efficiently managing information over its lifecycle.corner of the globe. If you have continuous business
Infrastructure Simplificationoperations, then people can get what they need
Infrastructure simplification is a process by whichfrom your business-helping bolster your success and
organizations contain expenses, enable businesscompetitive advantage.To achieve all this, you need a
growth, and reduce operational risks by optimizing ITcomprehensive Business Continuity plan for your
resources. Simplified infrastructures hold the promisebusiness.
of improved system optimization and Total Cost of· High Availability is achieved by means of fault
Ownership (TCO), higher personnel productivity andtolerant, failure resistant infrastructure supporting
greater application availability through infrastructurecontinuous application processing.
resiliency. Once simplified, the infrastructure can be· Continuous Operations imply non-disruptive
better managed for lower cost and with fewerbackups and system maintenance coupled with
errors.continuous availability of applications.
Consolidation· Disaster Recovery means protection against
IBM TotalStorage products can help consolidate theunplanned outages such as natural disasters through
storage environment. With fewer elements toreliable and predictable recovery methods.
manage which can increase resource utilization andInformation Lifecycle Management
simplify storage management, this can provide theInformation has become an increasingly valuable
ability to share storage servers over extendedasset. But as the quantity of information grows, it
distances and provide economies of scale for owningbecome increasingly costly and complex to store and
disk storage servers. There are four main methodsmanage. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a
of consolidation: centralization of data centers,process for managing information through its lifecycle,
physical consolidation, data integration and applicationfrom conception until disposal, in a manner that
integration.optimizes storage and access at the lowest cost. For
Virtualizationsmall and medium-sized enterprises, predicting storage
Virtualization of physical resources is an essential partneeds and controlling costs can be especially
of a simplified storage environment. They are morechallenging as the business grows.
flexible since the logical files and disks can be