This IBM Redbooks publication provides an overview of the solution offerings — IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning. It presents an overview of the product components and functions, explaining the architecture and showing the use of storage provisioning workflows. This book is intended for those who want to learn more about IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning, and IBM TotalStorage Provisioning Manager. This easy-to-follow guide describes on demand provisioning for managing resources and information, as well as enhancing automation by explaining how these innovative offerings may improve client business. The book explains how to take storage management concepts to the next level, describing the architecture, components, and component interaction, explaining storage automation, and showing how to create high and low level workflows by using examples along with common storage management tasks. Narrated screen recordings in QuickTime format: IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center LaunchPad demonstration (26MB) IBM Tivoli TotalStorage Provisioning Manager Overview (62MB) IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning Workflow Case Study (66MB) Please note that the additional material referenced in the text is not available from IBM.

The explosive growth of stored data, the increasing value of the data, and the fact that it is often distributed over multiple heterogeneous servers has created significant problems for backing up and archiving data. Also, the increased pressure for more productive IT time and less time for administrative tasks means that there is more data to backup in less time. This IBM Redbooks publication explains how tape drives and tape libraries can use storage area networks (SANs) to solve these problems. It explains how you can exploit SANs to attach, share, and exploit IBM tape subsystems and tape libraries. The ability to share tape libraries across many hosts creates a tremendous financial advantage that can be an immediate benefit of implementing SANs in your enterprise. You can often achieve significant cost savings and increase data security by implementing the tape sharing and extended distance capabilities of SAN. This book also includes a practical description of the products and components that were made available with the IBM SAN product rollout. For a definitive guide to SANs and their implementation, refer to the book Designing an IBM Storage Area Network, SG24-5758. Although the primary focus in this book is on SAN tape solutions, you must also understand advances in SAN-attached disk storage, advances in copy functions, and storage management software.