• Simplified Management and Improved Storage Utilization, with excellent performance
• Data Protection and improved Business Continuity
• Support for Global Access, Multi-Site Operation

IBM System Storage Multilevel Grid Access Manager Software enables customers with single or multiple sites and with fixed content/reference data storage requirements to improve storage utilization and investment across sites via an enterprise-wide, fault-tolerant storage grid with real time failover capabilities. Grid Access Manager Software can help protect enterprise data via the use of automated replication, lifecycle management and digital signature functionality.

The need to retain massive volumes of business critical fixed-content data for long periods of time is presenting new data and storage management challenges for IT. Users continue to demand fast performance as well as higher and broader availability of enterprise data. Massive data volumes combined with long retention periods require storage administrators to deliver a cost effective storage strategy that meets the user’s needs, protects valuable data, scales on demand, simplifies data migration and automates recovery from both planned and unplanned downtime.

Grid Access Manager Software can help customers address these critical challenges by delivering an automated and virtualized storage and data management layer that can be deployed locally or across multiple facilities and even on heterogeneous storage hardware. Grid Access Manager Software achieves this by presenting itself to enterprise applications as a single storage system that can aggregate underlying storage silos into a single enterprise storage pool—even if these silos are spread across multiple facilities and consists of heterogeneous storage media. This highly automated system can allow IT administrators to focus on storage planning and infrastructure improvements and eliminate many manual administration tasks.

• Intelligent Information Lifecycle Management—Grid Access Manager Software enables the creation of information lifecycle management (ILM) policies that govern the geographic location and placement of data in a multi-tier, multi-facility storage system. Intelligent ILM can help deploy the right storage in the right place, on the right media, at the right time based on its relevance and value to the organization.
• Operation across facilities and tiers—Capacity, performance and geographic scope of Grid Access Manager Software may be increased by adding new nodes. As nodes are added typically in a non-disruptive manner, Grid Access Manager Software can continue to present itself as one large scalable computing system. Grid Access Manager Software automatically re-configures the environment to take advantage of the new resources.
• Hardware Agnostic—Grid Access Manager Software utilizes industry-standard servers and storage empowering administrators to deliver a 'best of breed' enterprise storage strategy with the flexibility to adapt over time. A Grid Access Manager Software solution can be composed of heterogeneous storage platforms with multiple storage media (such as SCSI, SATA and tape) from multiple vendors.
• Automated Data Migration—Grid Access Manager Software can automate the movement of data from obsolete resources to new resources—reducing or eliminating manual, disruptive data migration projects.
• Open, Standards Based Access—With support for industry-standard interfaces (including CIFS and NFS) and protocols (such as HTTP), Grid Access Manager Software enables organizations to implement an enterprise fixed-content-storage strategy.
• Proactive Monitoring and Management—Grid Access Manager Software is designed to reduce the cost of management by continuously monitoring the health of the system including storage, servers and network and pro-actively alerts administrators if issues arise. Administrators can monitor and manage the grid from across the network using the single pane, Web-based management console. More than 200 real-time and historical reports, allow administrators to track CPU, network, storage resources and digital data assets themselves.

Grid Access Manager Software is designed to support business continuity by creating multiple copies of data and automatically replicating them geographically or to different storage tiers based on customer rules so they are no longer vulnerable to potential issues. Designed to support continuous operations even in the event of failure, Grid Access Manager Software provides automated recovery to help maintain business resiliency. The solution also supports continuous operation during hardware refreshes, capacity upgrades and data migration.

• Data Integrity Protection—Grid Access Manager Software is designed to protect the integrity and authenticity of stored data using digital fingerprints. Data integrity is pro-actively monitored and verified when data is stored, replicated, restored and retrieved. Integrity checks can be performed on demand and if errors are encountered, Grid Access Manager Software can automatically create another replica from a known good copy.
• High Availability—Grid Access Manager Software is designed to provide a fault tolerant, resilient and self-healing solution. Storage services can remain available even after hardware, storage and network failures occur or where entire sites are completely destroyed.
• Automated Recovery—In the event of site, storage or system failure, Grid Access Manager Software automates data recovery to fully restore the storage system to the original state. During this period, storage services continue to be available.

Designed to efficiently deliver fast, enterprise availability for petabytes of data across sites linked together with varying bandwidth networks presents a challenge for traditional storage systems. Grid Access Manager Software enables formation of archives that can scale to petabytes of data across hundreds of sites. Key enabling features:

• Object Store with Global Name Space—Grid Access Manager Software provides an object based storage system that can scale to petabytes (capacity) and billions of objects (object count) in a single unified system that can span multiple sites and tiers. A global name space gives access to stored objects using globally unique object identifiers, which can be accessed from any grid resource—regardless of location or storage tier. This eliminates storage silos to enable efficient and effective multi-site access.
• WAN Optimized Replication—Grid Access Manager Software provides policy based N-way data replication amongst sites and heterogeneous storage hardware. The replication semantics are highly optimized for WAN operation and designed to recover from congestion or link failure.