IBM Delivers On SAN Initiative With New Solutions and Industry's Largest SAN Testing Center - storage area network management software for Netfinity servers - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Dec 20, 1999

The Lab can process 10,000 million instructions per second and has 40 trillion characters of disk storage for testing and enough fibre-optic cabling to stretch from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles and back again.

It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and just in case, has diesel-powered back-up generators to ensure maximize testing up time.

The Lab also is unique in that it can leverage an enormous variety of industry hardware and software already in place at IBM's National Testing Center, used by IBM Global Services to conduct performance testing of customers' IT environments.

On hand, and used interoperably, are hundreds of NT, UNIX, enterprise server and storage subsystems from Brocade, Compaq, Crossroads, Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, McData, Sun, STK and other networking and hardware vendors. The SAN Lab also features IBM's new Enterprise Storage Server or "Shark."

Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Manager 7.0

IBM also upgraded its Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Subsystem with new Storage Manager software. This new software, with improved functionality, can be utilized across multiple Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Subsystems in SANs. Designed to support the increasingly complex fibre channel storage product portfolio, the Java-based Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Manager v7.0 offers:

Storage partitioning -- a compelling new feature that enables consolidating storage from multiple Netfinity servers to a single RAID storage subsystem thus reducing the overall storage management costs by creating "pools" of available shared storage;

An integrated, easy-to-use management console with intuitive graphical interface;

Automated device discovery and one-button configuration to reduce the complexity of configuring the RAID storage subsystem;

Background data scrubbing, designed to reduce or eliminate problems in the physical storage media;

Greater flexibility in configuring large storage arrays. Starting Wednesday, the Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Manager 7.0 will be bundled with new Netfinity Fibre Channel Storage Subsystems and available as a free upgrade to existing customers, who can download this software from http://www.pc.ibm.com/support .

IBM ServerProven(2) SAN and Storage Management Applications

To complement the five new enterprise SAN solutions, IBM is testing the following SAN and storage management applications for interoperability as part of the IBM ServerProven Program:

HP SureStore E SAN Manager LUN Management (LM) enables IT Professionals to manage a Fibre Channel SAN in a highly-efficient manner. SAN Manager LM allows heterogeneous or homogeneous systems to utilize a common pool of storage devices on a storage area network.

Legato NetWorker helps organizations easily protect vast amounts of critical distributed data by offering heterogeneous platform support, automated media handling, interoperable tape format, data stream parallelism, remote tape management, and automatic integration with the popular storage management frameworks in the network environment. Legato GEMS SmartMedia SAN technology enables applications to share tape libraries while enhancing the management of tracked media. Together, Legato NetWorker and Legato GEMS SmartMedia provide LAN-free backup and recovery for mission-critical SAN-based applications.