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• reducing data storage expenses for your records

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Innovative VAR addresses Information Lifecycle Management

Tom Lewis, President of Innovative VAR, introduces Information Lifecycle Management and ways Innovative VAR can help you with information in this newsletter.

What is On-Demand; what does it mean to you?

How does IBM’s On-Demand strategy address managing data securely, efficiently and cost effectively? How do you manage the storage infrastructure itself? How do you scale for the future?
It’s all about access! In your environment, access to data is critical and "On-Demand" is just another way of saying that.

The Scoop on Storage Management

Managing and planning a storage infrastructure is an often overlooked piece of the storage discussion. Too often, immediate demand for storage assets ends up driving the discussion around storage, and customers end up with an overly complex, inefficient storage infrastructure. IBM's TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC) is a suite of products designed to help manage, analyze and automate storage infrastructures.

E-mail Security - are you safe?

E-mail is undeniably a critical business tool, but it can carry viruses, spam, worms, trojans, spyware, phishing scams, and other harmful content. It is estimated that spam constitutes between 60% and 90% of all e-mail sent. Ensuring that you have a strong e-mail defense system saves your organization money and productivity.

Innovative VAR can help you with Information Lifecycle Management

Tom Lewis, President of Innovative VAR explains

As I work with many of you on a daily basis, I consistently hear your concerns regarding the challenges you face in managing your storage needs. Often, due to legal reasons, documents and other critical information must be stored for long periods of time. This requirement is often at odds with the pressures being faced by most information technology departments. In addition, the challenge of retaining information for long periods of time in traditional database or email systems frequently results in performance degradation.

Proper iSeries storage management can alleviate this situation by ensuring that your most critical data resides in the right place. This decision can reduce your costs while improving your performance - a winning combination!

Let Innovative VAR help you assess your information retention concerns. Contact us via our website at www.innovativevar.com or via this newsletter by clicking on the “get advice” button below. We look forward to working with you to help you manage your resources more effectively and less expensively.  

What is On-Demand - what does it mean to you?

The On-Demand objectives are simple:

1. Simplify the underlying IT infrastructure and its management to help lower cost and complexity while increasing your ability to respond to changing demands.

2. Help assure business continuity, security, data integrity and availability.

3. Efficiently manage information throughout its lifecycle, relative to its business value.

It is difficult to administer effective organization-wide policies concerning data when that data is not centrally located and managed. IBM’s “On Demand” strategy attempts to provide the roadmap to implement effective Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies by focusing the IT decision maker on the importance of scalability, integration, resiliency and automation.

IT infrastructure simplification through server and storage consolidation are critical pieces of efficient, scalable and manageable data environments. In the last issue of PowerShift, Innovative VAR presented the topic of IT Simplification or "Virtualization" which addressed the benefits of physical server and storage consolidation. If you missed that article, you may access it by clicking here!

Let’s review briefly the objectives of IT Simplification or "Virtualization." They include:

1. consolidation of dispersed storage resources

2. provide a unified, strategic view of your data and sharing

3. break through traditional storage complexity with advanced management capabilities

4. innovation to unify and simplify heterogeneous storage environments

While simplifying the infrastructure is a large part, ILM is equally important as it relates to storage of critical records and reducing storage expenses. ILM is the process of managing business data throughout its lifecycle from conception until disposal - optimizing storage and access at the lowest cost.

Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet or "one solution fits all” for Information Lifecycle Management. It begins by analyzing your environment from the point data is created to the point it is permanently archived or destroyed. Proper Information Lifecycle Management strategies begin with two questions:

1. What are the policies governing the access, retention and security of the data my organization uses and produces?

2. What infrastructure will I provide to store and access this data and how will I manage that environment?

ILM can be helpful to organizations concerned about the following:

• reducing storage costs while increasing the amount of information stored

• controlling the growth of database and email systems

• improving system performance

• adherence to information retention legal requirements as needed to meet compliance regulation

Whether you are an organization with hundreds of trucks or less than 100, Innovative VAR can help you with your unique storage management concerns.

...on how Innovative VAR can help you accomplish your IT simplification strategy

TotalStorage Productivity Center

The good news and bad news of storage management

Good news: The cost per megabyte of storage is going down at record rates.
Bad news: The need for data storage is going up even faster!
Result: Overall storage costs are rising.

Good news: In the last decade most organizations have added more servers with valuable applications.
Bad news: The total storage environment has become very complex.
Result: Utilization of installed storage is going down, further driving up cost.

Good news: Today's storage hardware options are powerful and affordable.
Bad news: Every $1 spent on storage hardware could cost you $8 to manage!
Result: Total cost of owning storage is in danger of growing exponentially.

No wonder some of the larger and more advanced IT users are reporting that 55% of their total spending on IT goes to storage. The question is "How do we learn from what they are going through to stop these costs growing in your organization?"

Computer - heal thyself

The simple reality is that managing an increasingly complex, organization-wide, storage environment has become a productivity challenge similar to the challenges that organizations faced in the past with accounting or inventory control. In the same way that IT "application" solved those business challenges, we need an automated solution for the management of storage. What's called for is:

• A total solution that covers all storage across the organization

• That can increase the productivity of the hardware assets themselves - and the productivity of the people who administer and acquire these assets

That's why we call it TotalStorage Productivity Center - a significant "application" in itself to bring the same discipline, excellent management and automation to storage management that your IT brings to your prime business processes.

The right answers to many questions

Pascal said that "Asking the right question is 90% of finding the right answer." If only that were true with the ever increasing complexity of our storage infrastructure. We all know the right storage questions. TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC) provides the answers to these and many other questions:

Why are data stores growing?

How can I forecast the growth?

How much worthless data am I storing?

Which systems should be migrated to new technology?

How can I keep storage inventories up-to-date?

How much application downtime is storage-related?

How can I audit and enforce my storage policies?

TPC doesn't just answer these and many other questions. It provides detailed, accurate answers with history and trends. Then, it presents the answers in easy-to-understand charts that make the conclusions jump out at you.

When we say Total we mean Total

TPC is a full implementation of IBM's architecture for Storage Infrastructure Management. But as the diagram to the right shows, this is only on element in a comprehensive roadmap for all aspects of storage and content management.

If your current IT environment is relatively simple, you might find images of sledgehammers and nuts come into your mind. But ponder the fact that what you have today would have been considered huge and exotic just a few years ago. Equally, storage setups that are highly exotic today will probably be part of your reality before we have a new US President.

That's why you must buy software that is part of a long-term, comprehensive plan. Especially in an area like storage management. In this regard, the IBM roadmap, and TotalStorage Productivity Center as part of that roadmap, are in a class of their own.


... on how your IT operations, provisioning and planning could benefit from TPC

E-Mail Security - Are you Safe?

System E-mail security is at the forefront of everyone's mind these days as we get seem to get more spam than meaningful e-mails. While e-mail has become the most popular communication vehicle in the world, it seems that spammers and virus writers have become the largest group in the world. Behind the convenience of e-mail looms a real threat other than just the irritation of junk mail - viruses, worms, spyware, pornographic material and other harmful content that can seriously compromise your organization's ability to function.

Innovative VAR with IBM Express Managed Security Services can help. Through a comprehensive suite of services, e-mail is scanned and monitored before it ever reaches your network. This service is designed to offer better protection and faster response to emerging threats than can be achieved in-house - and at a much lower cost. This infrastructure acts as your first line of defense by eliminating threats outside your network - without the need for any extra software, hardware or staff.

Benefits of E-mail Security: Acts as a critical line of defense by scanning e-mail and helping eliminate threats outside your network Helps protect your business against the downtime and damage caused by viruses Quarantines spam outside your network, alleviating bandwidth and storage issues Removes unacceptable images and content according to your e-mail policies

Get protection against downtime and damage from viruses, alleviate storage issues and bandwidth deficiencies from spam and protect confidential information. A team of expert engineers and support personnel actively manage your e-mail security, 24x7. The additional level of security provided by the service helps reduce the opportunity for hackers to attack your organization's infrastructure. And should your e-mail servers go down, e-mail continuity is provided, and your incoming messages will be delivered when service is restored.

Contact us today to learn how your organization can take advantage of these comprehensive services. Choose from anti-virus, anti-spam, image control and content control. Because there's no infrastructure to buy and set-up, you'll avoid upfront capital expense and have the e-mail security options you choose implemented in no time. This service features subscription pricing on a per-user basis, and you pay only for the options you select. Focus your resources on your core business priorities while limiting your business risk.

...on how e-mail security can clarify and enrich your communications

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