Tivoli beefs up SAN offerings

Tivoli, which has suffered criticism from its parent IBM for its lacklustre performance, has beefed up its product offerings in the fast-growing SAN (storage area network) marketplace.

The company on Tuesday announced a SAN extension toolkit for the Tivoli NetView network management platform. The toolkit enables SAN products to be centrally managed, along with other networking devices such as routers, hubs, switches, workstations, PCs and laptops, from a single console when using Tivoli NetView.

In addition the company announced Tivoli Storage Manager 4.1, which includes a host of new features including automated network backup, tape resource sharing, network-free rapid data recovery, LAN-free and multi-threaded data transfer and adaptive differencing technology, a patented technology to end bandwidth bottlenecks.

Storage Manager users offload business-critical data, that could otherwise clog their LAN's arteries to a separate, dedicated SAN.

Tivoli announced 4.1 and the toolkit at its annual user conference, Planet Tivoli 2000, which is ongoing this week in Philadelphia.

In his keynote speech, Jan Lindelow, CEO of Tivoli, said he believed that in the near future all businesses in the Global 2000 will be using SANs.

The company also announced an agreement to integrate Tivoli Storage Manager with EMC's Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and software. That software includes EMC's TimeFinder, which periodically takes a snapshot of data on a system.

The new version of Storage Manager backs up that snapshot, rather than the whole system.

Some non-storage announcements are expected from Tivoli as the week progresses.

The company is somewhat under the gun from IBM as its sales in the first quarter of this year were flat, while its competitors flourished. Tivoli has not been helped by executives jumping ship.

As silicon.com reported earlier in May, the company lost its CIO, John Ciulla, to Vignette. Since last October, six other senior executives have left including chief technology officer Tom Bishop.