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As IT budget spending on disk and SAN storage systems rises back to prominence, customers are sounding the call for better storage infrastructure optimization and manageability within mixed-vendor environments.

To help simplify the complexity of numerous moving parts, IBM on Tuesday unveiled the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center. Available in May, Productivity Center is a modular suite of storage and virtualization software products earmarked to centralize management of multiple storage hardware systems, as well as analyze performance metrics to conduct error-mapping and to prevent hardware failures before they occur, said Theresa O’Neil, director of Storage Strategy for IBM Tivoli Storage Software, in Austin, Texas.

With a heavy emphasis on automation and configuration, Productivity Center comprises four parts. New products focused on disk activities include IBM Performance Manager and Replication Manager, with both falling under TotalStorage Multiple Device Manager. In addition, Productivity Center features IBM Tivoli SAN Manager for heterogeneous SAN management and IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager to enable storage resource performance management through monitoring, reporting and real-time alerts, noted O’Neil.

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