IBM SSD Hands Storage Manager to Tivoli
IBM more firmly entrenched its ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) in the rapidly developing AS/400 enterprise storage management market earlier this month when Big Blue transferred responsibility for the product from its Storage Systems Division (SSD) to Tivoli Systems Inc., effective January 1, 1999.
The move is expected to significantly increase IBM’s share of the growing distributed storage management market by combining the strength and technology of these two IBM divisions. The storage management market is expected to grow to $2.1 billion by the year 2001, according to International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.).
"Storage management continues to become an increasingly important part of an IT organization’s management solution," says Martin Neath, executive VP of Tivoli Systems. "The combination of the Tivoli and ADSM organizations will provide customers with a broader, more integrated approach to IT management and represent a superb fit within Tivoli’s overall management solution."
Both Tivoli and SSD have come to realize there are "tremendous opportunities" for IBM to leverage both the technology and expertise within the storage division with Tivoli’s focus on enterprise management to deliver even more "compelling" storage solutions for customers, according to Neath.
"Customers will benefit from this integration in a number of ways, including the addition of state-of-the-art data backup and restore, archiving, disaster recovery planning and hierarchical storage management," Neath says.
Tivoli’s area of coverage spans more than 30 operating systems, including all those offered my Microsoft, as well as OS/400, OS/390, Novell, OS/2, Unix, VAX and Tandem. Similarly, ADSM has a very broad coverage of platforms, "so there’s a very strong, complementary fit there," Neath adds. "We do not anticipate any changes or diminishing any investment in any of those specific platforms, and in fact we’re looking to make sure we’re covering the broad range of platforms," he says.
Frank Elliot, VP of marketing and strategy for IBM’s SSD, says, "It’s really a natural evolution for us that not only leverage’s Tivoli’s leadership in systems management, but IBM’s worldwide strengths in storage management technology and development. Increasingly, our customers are recognizing that they cannot separate storage management from their overall enterprise management. In fact, storage management is the largest and fastest growing segment of enterprise management.
"To best position ADSM within the overall systems management framework, we’ve decided to more closely integrate the sales and marketing activities for ADSM with Tivoli’s leadership in systems management," Elliot says.
Tivoli is in the process of porting much of its framework to the AS/400, but its support for AS/400 is not yet that good, according to Paul Mason, VP of infrastructure software research for IDC. "ADSM is one of the few products that supports the AS/400 both as a client and as a server," he says. "It’s actually one of the few storage management products which is sufficiently cross-platform that it can handle AS/400s, S/390 and Unix."
Taking over ADSM gives Tivoli one of the better products for the AS/400 and provides them a lot of incentive to continue in that direction, according to Mason. "But I think it will be important for the future of the ADSM product because Tivoli has the resources to really move this forward into new areas, particularly storage area networking and things like that," he concludes.