PLCS Reporter v2.5 for Tivoli Storage Manager

Headquartered in Hendrik Ido Ambacht, The Netherlands, PLCS EU., provider of software products for data backup management solutions, is releasing version 2.5 of its PLCS Reporting software. 

Now also shipping as a virtual machine, PLCS Reporter provides (enterprise) monitoring of a company’s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Available on March 16, 2010, PLCS Reporter v2.5 provides live data gathering, and one button analysis, reporting and trending of critical backup servers and clients.
 
“PLCS Reporter version 2.5 is an excellent new product add-on for existing Tivoli Storage Manager customers,” said Peter Pijpelink, manager  of research and development for PLCS. “As part of this upgrade, we’ve created a simplified installation process, so our partners can quickly help their customer’s enjoy the benefits of this solution.”

Key features of PLCS Reporter v2.5 include asset management, dynamic performance reporting, departmental charge back capabilities and trending analysis that predicts resource conformity and TSM environmental constraints. With Reporter customers can now generate reports on enterprise levels containing multiple TSM Server instances, like reports on how many successful backups took place from one datacenter to the disaster recovery datacenter.
 
Also the ability in Reporter 2.5 to generate reports on CPU processor usage by TSM clients and application backups (TDP)  is very important as this gives the customers a detailed view how many CPU’s they are using on their TSM environment. PLCS also integrated this CPU reporting capability into VMWare environments so not only physical (windows) machines reports are available but also complete reports on virtualized environments using a agentless method of collection. PLCS also build into this version the capability to automatically send operational reports by e-mail so a operator can see in one overview the status of the backup results from last night.
 
“PLCS has really hit the ball out of the park with the release of Reporter v2.5,” said Thomas Simon, president of MGBS, Inc. “The new functionality gives my customers the visibility they need to quickly monitor their Tivoli Storage Manager environments around the world.”

PLCS Reporter’s data collection process runs to capture data from customer’s TSM servers and stores it in its own database. Reporter uses the data to provide reports and alerts of your server environment and to generate reports for problem analysis, trending, hardware utilization statistics, and configuration inconsistencies.

Same with this new release PLCS gives customers the option to detect which files ystems might not be configured correctly for backup, it happens that a new disk is added but not configured in the backup product, with the asset management capabilities of version 2.5 those mistakes are of the past as Reporter will show clearly a comparison between data in backup and local disk on a machine, using this methodology customers can’t go wrong!

Since Reporter uses its own database to analyze data and generate reports, customer’s TSM servers are not impacted by long running queries or select statements. The historical views provided by PLCS Reporter of your Tivoli Storage Manager environment and operations are a great troubleshooting and problem determination tool for hard to diagnose problems like intermittent client or process failures and network bandwidth issues. Reporter is the only product on the market which offers enterprise reporting capabilities for TSM servers. Customers do not need to use different spreadsheets but can now use Reporter to get detailed information on all their TSM Servers.
 
Reporter got awarded by IBM labs with the status of being a ‘Ready for IBM Tivoli’ product which means IBM did validate Reporter for use with their TSM products.
 
PLCS Reporter v2.5 is priced per TSM server instance. Reporter is 100% compatible with TSM server release 5.x and 6.x.