PLCS Process Manager for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) automatically detects all of your TSM servers and storage pools and, based on user-defined policies, automatically performs all of the daily chores.

One of the most obvious effects of a growing TSM environment is the increase in time it takes to manage all TSM servers. A lot of that time is spend on managing the daily housekeeping, making sure that everything has worked as expected. With Process Manager, you only need to investigate those events that have failed, allowing you to focus on those things that really matter.

In a larger enterprise environment, scheduling the daily chores for your TSM servers becomes harder and harder. Tasks failing due to a temporarily lack of tape drives become a fact of life.
Users are complaining that they either can't restore or have to wait for ages for a restore to finish; this is becoming more common as your environment expands.

The solution is so simple, if only you had a central scheduler that would keep track of all of your drives and all of your running processes! Now, with Process Manager all of your scheduling problems are a part of the past. Working with a user-defined set of policies, all of your housekeeping tasks are performed as efficiently as possible. With its automatic configuration, Process Manager automatically detects newly installed TSM servers, newly added storage pools and newly installed drives in your library and automatically adjusts for the changes in your environment.

Depending on your preferences, Process Automation logs the results of its activities in file, e-mail of on the console. Additionally you can configure a TCP/IP service that can be used to monitor the progress live from any remote system.

Process Manager automatically detects all libraries defined on all TSM servers it manages. Also, it's fully capable of working with Gresham Clareti EDT to manage ACSLS libraries.

Depending on your particular environment, it might be quite easy to define a set of default policies for Process Automation; defining defaults for copy storage pool names and parallelism allows Process Automation to automatically do the right thing when a new TSM server is provisioned, or a new storage pool is defined. In some cases, a hard-coded default value is used, in other cases Process Automation depends on the administrator to provide a sensible value.

Some jobs are more important than others, and your priorities might even change as time progresses. Process Automation will submit each job in a specific queue and will only run lower priority jobs when no run able jobs have been found in higher priority queues. The behavior can be modified to more strictly enforce the sequence of jobs, de pending on your preferences.

When your daily housekeeping is being performed, you try to make maximum use of all of your tape drives. Unfortunately, this is usually the time that your users want their files restored, and they want them fast. Keeping one (or more) drives free at all times allows you to satisfy your user requirements while at the same time not wasting valuable resources.

Process Automation can be monitored using several means. Most commonly e-mail is send on regular intervals, allowing the recipients to take action on failed jobs. Alternatively, all events can be logged to a file or the Process Automation console. The TCP/IP interface not only allows you to receive messages when jobs finish, but also allows you to list the contents of each queue at all times.