IBM sets store in Tivoli

By Paul Montgomery

IBM has included under its Tivoli subsidiary the assets from a new acquisition in consolidated storage management software.

IBM purchased the shared storage business unit of US-based Mercury Computer Systems last December for $37.9 million. Tivoli now controls and manages Mercury's SANergy line of file sharing products based on the Storage Area Network (SAN) concept.

"The SANergy acquisition allows us to manage heterogeneous SAN environments," said Grant Smith, storage specialist at Tivoli.

Products from IBM's storage systems division, most notably the ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager, were transferred to Tivoli at the start of 1999. The ADSTAR product has now been updated to version 3.7 under the name of Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

"We've chosen to look at our storage management software under the Tivoli umbrella," said Mr Smith. "The products were already integrated with the rest of Tivoli's software, so it made more sense. The first release of TSM was a major new release of the product, which had been announced a year ago."

As with previous versions, the application can be set to archive only that data which has changed since the previous back up, using a technique called adaptive differencing technology.

"We are targeting the mobile environment, where rather than transferring entire files, the user wants just a byte or a block or whatever they need," said Mr Smith.

"TSM covers the traditional back up necessities. It also exploits the hardware infrastructure of the new SAN environments," said Mr Smith. "The impetus there is sharing of data. Hooking up is easy, but if you can't share with [also maintaining] the integrity of your data, [it's not worth it]."