PHILADELPHIA (05/23/2000) - Tivoli Systems Inc. strengthened its storage management arsenal on Tuesday at its Planet Tivoli user conference here with new products and partnerships designed to take advantage of the growing market segment and its importance to emerging e-businesses.

Among Tuesday's highlights at Planet Tivoli, the network management company announced a new version of Tivoli Storage Manager, a SAN (storage area network) extension toolkit for the Tivoli NetView network management platform, and a partnership with EMC that will provide automated online information backup and enhance management and storage capabilities for enterprise information.

New features incorporated into Tivoli Storage Manager 4.1 include automated network backup, tape resource sharing, network-free rapid data recovery, and LAN-free and adaptive technology integration (based on productivity needs), said Larry Orecklin, vice president and general manager of the Tivoli Storage Management Business Unit.

Orecklin said that by using the SAN extension toolkit for Tivoli NetView, systems administrators can "streamline" management of network devices such as routers, hubs, switches, workstations, PCs, laptops, and SAN hardware devices from one central console. Tivoli NetView lets users manage SANs, LANs, and WANs from a single open systems environment.

EMC and Tivoli have agreed to integrate Tivoli Storage Manager with EMC's Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and software. The collaboration also includes integration with EMC TimeFinder, meaning customers can take comfort in automated online information backup, restoration, and management capabilities for their enterprise data.

Tivoli Systems Inc., in Austin, Texas, is at www.tivoli.com.

Brian Fonseca is an InfoWorld reporter.