IBM Offers Enhanced Storage Software That Boosts Scalability and Addresses Performance

Service Management Software Helps Ensure Business Continuity With Optimized Use of Resources to Deliver on Increasingly Demanding Service Levels

ARMONK, NY - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Tivoli Storage Manager 6, software designed to help customers reduce operational costs by improving scalability and addressing the performance of their storage management assets, cut capital expenditures by reducing duplicate data to lower storage capacity needs, and simplify the overall management of their data protection infrastructure. As part of IBM’s Service Management strategy, Tivoli Storage Manager 6 offers customers significant efficiency gains while improving their ability to meet increasingly demanding service levels.

Tivoli Storage Manager helps customers address the issue of managing the tidal wave of data growth with agility and speed. With data reduction capabilities, scalability, performance and availability, the Tivoli Storage Manager family provides support for the widest range of systems -- from laptops to mainframes -- for an end-to-end data management solution for organizations of all sizes. It is also designed to help customers effectively meet and improve service levels, while reducing risks and energy consumption.

According to IDC(1), 180 exabytes of digital content was created, captured, or replicated in 2006 and the number is expected to multiply by 10 times to 1,800 exabytes by 2011. Data deduplication has emerged as a key technology in the effort to reduce the amount of data and the cost of storing it. Also introduced today, Tivoli Storage Manager Extended Edition offers a data reduction capability to help customers control and slow the rate of backup data growth by identifying and eliminating redundant data, which can result in more effective use of storage capacity and lower capital costs. This expands on IBM’s comprehensive data deduplication portfolio, which includes complementary technologies such as IBM ProtecTIER.

“Large or small, businesses today are faced with ever-increasing amounts of data and pressures to cut costs,” said Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli. “The new features introduced with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 will help customers manage the explosion of data while maintaining reliable access to important business information. With increased visibility into data growth and enhanced scalability, customers can accommodate increased volumes of data, control the rate of backup data growth and improve efficiency across their storage environments.”

Through integration with IBM’s DB2 database software, Tivoli Storage Manager 6 helps customers cut operational costs with improved scalability and performance. This powerful database technology manages up to twice the amount of data objects, potentially allowing for management of one billion objects in a single system. According to IBM internal studies, customers can obtain as much as a 300 percent improvement in backup performance, which can enable them to increase workloads that can be managed within existing backup windows. The integrated database software also allows customers to retroactively apply policy changes to protected or archived objects.

In addition, Tivoli Storage Manager 6 offers new reporting and monitoring features that can simplify management and improve storage administrator productivity by increasing visibility into, and control of, the data protection environment through a customizable dashboard. Besides a broad range of predefined reports, customers also have flexibility to quickly and easily create custom reports. Since the new monitoring and reporting capability is built on IBM Tivoli Monitoring software, it integrates application, server and storage backup performance metrics to deliver a consolidated view of the broader IT environment.

“We are very excited about the new reporting and monitoring features as well as the enhanced scalability capabilities of Tivoli Storage Manager 6,” said Butch Umble of the Principal Financial Group. “The reporting capability gives us the tools we need to better manage our data protection environment in a more cost effective manner. The scalability will allow us to continue to deliver the high standards of data protection required in our organization.”

With more than 200 Beta testers, IBM has made significant investments in the development of its new offering to deliver a reliable storage management software solution with new capabilities that can help customers improve efficiency and reduce infrastructure and operational expenses.

“Chesapeake Energy uses Tivoli Storage Manager to help us stay ahead of our growing data management needs,” said Paul Conway, Senior System Administrator for Chesapeake Energy. “Our testing of the new version has gone very well, and we especially like the performance improvements with DB2. Some SQL jobs that previously took three to four hours can now be completed in 30 minutes. The new reporting and monitoring features should also simplify administration.”

“We are seeing higher scalability and system stability with the new version of TSM because the integration of the DB2 database leads to an increased active log size,” said Dipl.-Inform. Kirsten Glöer, University of Heidelberg. “The new item level recovery capabilities for Microsoft Exchange data will be very useful, as will the UTF-8 support for Linux clients.”

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager has long delivered a broad range of capabilities to manage data throughout its lifecycle. Tivoli Storage Manager 6 continues this tradition with a number of enhancements that are designed to reduce costs and improve service levels. Among these are new capabilities in IBM System Storage® N series network-attached storage systems (NAS) that can potentially reduce the time it takes to perform incremental file-level backups from hours to just minutes; improved integration with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for remote office data protection; item-level recovery of Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory environments; and full image backups of virtual machines in VMware environments.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 will be available March 27, 2009.

For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

[1] Source: IDC White Paper sponsored by EMC, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,” March 2008