Managed storage

Managed Storage Services is available in two options:

• Data and the associated applications are housed at one of IBM's e-business Hosting or Strategic Outsourcing Service Delivery Centers
• Data and the associated applications are housed at the customer's data center.

Regardless of where the data is housed, Managed Storage Services employs a two-tiered delivery model which combines remote monitoring and management with local delivery capabilities to provide an end-to-end storage management solution.

The graphic below shows an overview of the features and functions of the services offered through Managed Storage Services.

Capacity and access options

The pillars of the service are Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and Tape Storage technology. Managed Storage Services uses storage areas networks to provide Fibre Channel connectivity to highly available, block storage devices for improved systems and application performance. Network attached storage provides LAN access for customers who choose not to invest in Fibre Channel connectivity. Tape storage is used to support backup/restore, archiving and vaulting operations.

Essential services for support and performance management

Managed Storage Services delivers every customer engagement, whether it's disk capacity or backup/restore management, using a standard set of integrated services. The Transition and initial setup processes are used to design, plan, and deploy storage infrastructures. The Transition process also designs the coordinated operational activities between the customer and IBM so that customers have a smooth entry into the service. The Call Support and Monitoring features are provided on a 24x7 basis to assist customers in the use of the various features of Managed Storage Services, to resolve problems, and to react to any alerts discovered by the monitoring infrastructure. Provisioning represents the work done to meet customers' changing storage needs.

When a customer reports a problem, it is managed and tracked through a proven Problem Management Process until resolution. Capacity and Performance Management processes combine planning data with performance and capacity trend data collected by the SOC to balance workloads across existing storage infrastructure and plan for future capacity. The currency of the storage infrastructure is maintained through the Technology Refresh process, and technology updates are introduced as required. If changes to the production environment are necessary as a result of Problem Management, Maintenance, Capacity/Performance Management, or Technology Refresh activities, they are introduced in a controlled manner and coordinated with customers before implementation using a proven Change Management Process.

Service options that promote data availability and protection

• Local Copy Services provides a point-in-time copy of a logical storage volume to another logical volume within the same logical subsystem. This feature can be used to optimize data availability for backup/restore operations or to create a business application development environment that closely resembles live data.
• Remote Copy Services allows customers to duplicate data between two physically disparate storage locations. This capability helps customers implement fault tolerant applications, or it can be used to distribute data to multiple locations.
• Archiving allows customers to extend their standard backup and restore services to include data versioning based on aging rules.
• Vaulting offers protection for backup media by maintaining additional copies of backup data in an onsite or offsite vault.

Storage Operations Center

The Storage Operations Center (SOC) is the central nervous system of storage management operations and is staffed 24x7 by highly skilled storage experts. The SOC is responsible for reacting to operational alerts, provisioning storage, and directing operations in the field, as well as providing the core set of services described above.

Value Proposition

Many IBM customers have already concluded that they cannot afford the risks and costs associated with hardware obsolescence or choosing winning technologies from competing vendors. They don't have the time and the resources to react to the quickly changing storage technology market. They struggle to balance workloads among applications competing for computing and storage resources. They recognize the value in consolidating and centralizing their storage for improved data management and to enable disaster recovery solutions.

Managed Storage Services provides the control and flexibility customers seek so that they can be confident that their storage needs will be met today and in the future. As a subscription service, customers are billed only for the storage allocated to their account and can be charged based on a gigabyte-per-month metric. Capital expenditures for storage can reduced or eliminated.

Serving as an on demand infrastructure service for over five years now, and with more than two petabytes of storage under management, customers have a proven solution choice for procuring on demand storage capacity and management services - Managed Storage Services.

Managed Storage Services Resources

The following specification sheet and white paper provide more information about Managed Storage Services: Streamlining Data Storage (PDF, 47KB), Managed Storage Services: Improving performance without increasing capital expense (PDF, 1.2MB)

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