 As enterprise IT evolves into a more flexible, scalable instrument of business goals and strategies, one area in which optimization is particularly attractive is software provisioning.
Consider a typical enterprise-class data center of a thousand servers or more. Each server must be properly configured with the appropriate software, including operating systems, applications, middleware, data, and other resources. Furthermore, thanks to virtualization solutions, multiple logical servers may exist on any given physical server.
Clearly, in such a complex infrastructure, any means of ensuring that that software can be efficiently and accurately distributed to the proper servers is a tremendous business win. For this reason, IBM has delivered enhancements to IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM), an enterprise-class provisioning tool for Data Center Automation. TPM includes sophisticated features to automate common Data Center processes to optimize the usage of skills and resources and support the distribution of virtually any form of software to virtually any IT resource.
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Facilitates Energy Management Strategies
Furthermore, TPM delivers in a second compelling area as well: energy efficiency. Today's data centers, typically densely packed with blade servers, deliver more computing power per square foot than ever before—but also require more power, leading to cost-control complications and environmental consequences. TPM includes features that are used in IBM’s energy management offerings. By using functionality in TPM, servers can be put in standby mode in times of reduced workloads and reactivated when the demand increases. What's more, because TPM integrates seamlessly with another member of the IBM Tivoli system management portfolio, IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, TPM can even be configured to dynamically consolidate workloads to fewer servers, improving energy efficiency still further.
In fact, TPM plays a significant role in IBM's own energy reduction strategy— particularly essential, given IBM's status as the world's largest IT employer with the world's largest commercial IT infrastructure. Consider that while IBM data center computational power is expected to double over the next three years, IBM plans to achieve this increase without increasing either power consumption or the carbon footprint—an expected savings of five billion kilowatt hours annually.
New Features in IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Make it More Powerful Than Ever
Of course, IBM's primary focus is on its customers, and toward that end IBM is continually refining its solutions to serve those customers in new and powerful ways. With the recent release of IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 5.1.1., IBM delivers a compelling suite of new features which collectively make the product even more efficient, powerful, and yet also easier for IT professionals to use than ever.
Consider the new Web Replay feature. It's become increasingly clear that automation of IT solutions delivers many substantial business benefits for large organizations, among them reduction of costs, improved return on IT investment, enhanced efficiency, and the opportunity to free IT staff for tasks best suited to their talents and areas of domain expertise. While TPM already supports scripting, Web Replay is designed to make TPM automation even more straightforward and effective.
To use Web Replay, a skilled TPM administrator need only perform a given task manually once; the software will record mouse clicks, keystrokes, data insertion, and other workstation activities. This recorded sequence can then be stored, used, and reused on demand by any member of the staff with suitable access privileges. Not only are previously complex tasks reduced to a single button-push, but key TPM expertise that might previously have been known only to one staff member is now accessible to many.
Efficient and error-free installation is important to shorten the time-to-market and improve the ROI. TPM 5.1.1 includes an advanced installation wizard which performs intelligent preliminary environment checks. If a problem is likely to occur, users are notified in advance. While deployment times will necessarily vary from site to site, many users may find that TPM 5.1.1 will not require more than half a business day to install.
Furthermore, the solution now also includes improved integration with IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM), which creates infrastructure maps of composite applications. Information obtained from TADDM can now be routed directly to TPM, which, in turn, can provision software on an as-needed basis—enhancing relevant IT service levels as well as facilitating compliance initiatives that may apply.
Finally, TPM 5.1.1 delivers two other new features: Dynamic Content Delivery and Cross-Platform Patch Support. With Dynamic Content Delivery, organizations can expect accelerated delivery of content types such as video which require high file sizes and often involve comparatively slow network throughput as a result. Cross-Platform Patch Support, on the other hand, is specifically designed to assist organizations in the pursuit of a holistic compliance strategy by automating patch distribution, which may particularly apply in sensitive cases such as operating system security.
Proving the TPM Business Case
TPM 5.1.1's new features, then, appear to have the potential to deliver tremendous business value. How does that potential play out in real-world cases, though?
One impressive illustration of TPM business value comes from Northwind Consulting. Recently, this firm had a client which needed to accelerate its development test process—an area where software provisioning can deliver enormous improvement.
The test phase of software development requires that host machines operate in a strictly-controlled state, in order to ensure that problems that come up during testing are isolated to the software itself and don't originate outside it. However, for large testing sites involving hundreds of test computers, the preparation cycle can be tremendously lengthy; each of the test computers must be formatted and a known combination of software installed on it. The overall setup process must be as efficient as possible, yet any failure has the potential to invalidate test results.
Northwind's client was just such a large testing site. Their test base included over six hundred computers, and in order to handle all the complex requirements involved in test computer preparation, a staff of forty was required. Furthermore, the typical time needed for a complete system build was three weeks.
With Northwind's help, however, the client has migrated to TPM for provisioning. The result? That three-week timeframe has shrunk to a single day—a staggering cost savings. Furthermore, the consistency of the provisioning process has been substantially improved, enhancing the test results and the expected build quality of the software. Thus, TPM's best-in-class features not only help lower overhead for this particular client, but also help generate revenue.
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