Storage management is getting a lot of attention this week, as BMC Software Inc. and IBM's Tivoli Systems group announce new initiatives and products designed to help IT managers get a handle on explosive data growth.

At Storage Networking World in Orlando, Fla., BMC unveiled an initiative involving 15 major storage vendors, who will come together to develop an Application-Centric Storage Management product in the next nine months. Tivoli, meanwhile, announced that its Storage Network Manager will incorporate newly defined ANSI (American National Standards Institute) T11 SAN discovery and management standards.

BMC officials say their initiative centers on expanding the company's Patrol software, which monitors applications, operating systems, databases and middleware, to include a storage component. The idea is to put all of those layers into a stack so that the application can be logically mapped to the physical storage devices and storage can be tuned to optimize the application's performance.

"This unlocks the power of SANs and takes it to the next level," said Greg Reyes, president and CEO of Brocade Communications Systems Inc., of San Jose. Calif., one of the initiative's supporters. "It's more than just moving blocks of data. It's about getting data to the application when it needs it."

Other companies endorsing the initiative include EMC Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Crossroads Systems, Emulex, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM's Storage Systems Group, Sun Microsystems Inc., Nishan Systems, Veritas Software Corp. and Network Appliance Inc.

Knowledge Modules to enable Patrol storage management will be released over the next few months. This week, BMC released KMs for EMC Symmetrix and Network Appliance.

"The concept that we are putting forth is that managing storage resources in isolation has some value, but ideally you want to relate it back to the application," said Kathy Jaques, BMC's senior director of marketing for storage products.

Latest from Tivoli
Earlier this month, IBM expanded Tivoli Storage Management, which concentrated on backup and recovery solutions, to include the Storage Network Manager. This provides a centralized view of all SAN components and does the discovery of the physical devices.

The Storage Network Manager also enables a Web-based application to continue running even after it has run out of storage. A policy can be set up so that when an application approaches capacity, the Storage Network Manager automatically reallocates storage to that application.

Separately, Tivoli's SANergy has been expanded so that both large and small businesses can do file sharing. Previously, the product worked for large file-sharing environments only.

"SANergy allows you to share one copy of data across multiple servers, so now we can help customers manage the data more efficiently and reduce their costs," said Paul Ellis, director of marketing for Tivoli Storage Management Solutions.

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.