Data Storage Solutions: Achieving Savings Through Effective Storage Management

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr-fastback-center/?cm_mmc=agus_itmbipcty-20090810-usitp200-_-n-_-ms1-_-m

Mark Samuelson of Softchoice Corporation, an IBM Premier Business Partner, talks about how customers are thinking more dynamically about the data center, and achieving savings by implementing data storage solutions that prioritize the highest-value data for backup and recovery.
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We are an IBM Premier Business Partner focusing in on IBM’s Storage Practice. One large practice of ours is Tivoli Storage Management and Backup and Recovery.

…IBM gives some great solutions -- Tivoli Productivity Center -- that helps me be able to identify what is being stored on my storage environment, on my servers. How well is it being utilized? … Has the data been backed up? Those are all the components that my software can help me manage and ensure that I’m able to back up and recover and be able to reproduce that data that I deem as high value. And that’s something a lot of customers are achieving savings on, is -- instead of storing everything for these very long amounts of time, let’s store data that we’ve found that does have high value to the company. Low-value items can either not be backed up or just stored very transient--transient data, it can only be stored for a little while.

Customers are starting to change their thinking on the data center. Instead of just purchasing servers for an application, they’re starting to think more dynamically. With the virtualization technologies from IBM in the mid-range line, in the mainframe line, even down to the open systems line, we’re able to look at my computing resources as a virtual pool and be able to dynamically create new servers very quickly, very agile. And really I’m buying storage and I’m buying my servers when I need more processing power, not just simply for an application or a pet project.