Software Quarterly

And the Winner Is...

Providan Corp., a Louisville, Ky., financial services and insurance company, was looking for a data storage management product that would provide bullet-proof mainframe-like discipline for its distributed computing environment and support a wide range of hardware devices and communications protocols.


Scott Cumbie, Providan Corporation

The choice was the ADSTAR Distribution Storage Manager (ADSM) from IBM. "I'm not aware of any other product that comes close to providing what we needed," says Scott Cumbie, storage administrator for Providan. ADSM "incorporates policies that are similar to policies one would encounter in the hierarchical storage management (HSM) in the mainframe world," says Cumbie, "and that means I can provide a commonality of service across the enterprise."

ADSM entered the market for distributed client/server storage solutions in July 1993 and took it by storm. Licenses for ADSM already "equal or exceed those for competitive products" that use the MVS mainframe environment as the backup manager, says Glenn McDermed, an analyst for the Gartner Group. "At that rate of acceptance, it could easily become the de facto standard for enterprise storage management. IBM has established its leadership, and that's remarkable, given IBM's recent entry into the market niche the product serves."

How did ADSM succeed so quickly? The answer is actually quite simple, according to C.D. Larson, a California-based advisory storage specialist. ADSM, he says, was created simply "to provide some of the fundamentals, some of the simple stuff that got misplaced on the way to client/server. It supports a lot of non-IBM devices and platforms, is fun to work with, has a surprisingly high code quality, and is inexpensive."

Providan was one of the first companies to come to those same conclusions. The company maintains a central data center in Louisville built around two IBM ES/3090 mainframes. In addition, it operates close to 40 departmental LANs -- some of which support IBM's Systems Network Architecture protocols, and some of which are built around the TCP/IP standard -- at the home office and branch offices around the country. In its Philadelphia office, the company operates a Digital Equipment Corp. VAX and IBM RISC System/6000 workstations.

Providan Corp. has used ADSM since February 1993 primarily to provide centralized backup to the mainframe MVS environment for the dozens of Novell file servers. Because of the bandwidth issues related to moving data from branch offices to the central data center, the company for the time being is using ADSM only to manage data on the 40 Kentucky-based LANs. The company has not yet tackled the issues of centralized backup for its remote LAN servers. Nor has it waded into the quagmire of providing a centralized backup solution for the hundreds of workstations that are attached to the LAN servers that are being backed up incrementally.

In spite of what Cumbie described as "some agonies and ecstasies" in dealing with a multivendor environment, the software-based management platform "definitely has done what it is advertised to do."

Dean Smith, storage management consultant for ARCO Exploration and Production Technology in Plano, Texas, says ADSM's platform independence and support for multiple hardware storage devices provides his organization an essential tool in the client/server environment for migration from one hardware platform to another.

"The enterprise today has to have insurance that it can get data back over a long period of time," Smith says. "We regularly see data sets on host systems being recalled 10 years after they were migrated off. It's a requirement to recover data that's very old. We have to have a reasonable certainty that we can get at the data tomorrow or in five years."

ARCO's data center is "your traditional glass house" environment, says Smith. The company's business and scientific applications reside on Cray supercomputers and IBM ES/3090 mainframes. But the company also supports LANs and workstations throughout the oil company's worldwide operations.

ARCO uses ADSM to back up PCs, Macintoshes, and UNIX systems and has recently begun testing on Novell LANs. Smith's division provides weekly backups to the mainframe for Internet interfaces and individuals' desktops.

"Users have to determine what they want backed up to the (mainframe) server and what they don't want backed up," says Cookie Nguyen, senior control specialist at ARCO. "They have a scheduled backup once a week, but they have an option to change the schedule to back up more frequently if they need to."

Through graphical user and command line interfaces, ADSM enables data managers to set up and perform automated backups to the ADSM server, which can be MVS- or VM-based mainframes, AIX-based RS/6000 platforms, or a workstation running OS/2. ADSM servers for OS/400 and VSE/ESA will be available in September 1995 and March 1995, respectively. Also, plans are in place to make ADSM available for HP and Sun platforms. ADSM currently supports clients under Novell Netware; AIX; OS/2; Sun Microsystems SUNOS 3, 4, and Solaris; Microsoft Windows; Apple Macintosh; DOS; Hewlett-Packard HP-UX; SCO UNIX; and DEC Ultrix. Additional client support is being developed.

Flexible Protocols

Flexible communications protocols include support for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Systems Network Architecture, NetBIOS, Named Pipes (OS/2), Advanced Peer to Peer Communication, and LU 6.2. Using Daemon technology in the UNIX environment and Network Loadable Modules (NLM) in the Novell environment to automate timed backup processes, ADSM will automatically back up on a scheduled basis files that have been changed since the last backup.

ADSM is both scalable and portable; the server can be moved from MVS to a RISC platform, for example, and users probably wouldn't know that anything had changed.

The product supports an array of IBM and non-IBM optical and magnetic storage products, and media handling. In addition to pricing it competitively, the company is offering potential customers a 60-day test drive.





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