The dynamic infrastructure just got more dynamic

Improve service, reduce cost, and manage risk with a Dynamic Infrastructure

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Maximizing return on asset investment, by building an infrastructure that is scalable, flexible, integrated and cost-efficient, is more important than ever in today's difficult and unpredictable environment. A dynamic infrastructure can help organizations capitalize on the emerging potential of a "smarter planet" where newly-linked information pools, increased interconnectivity across boundaries and pervasive digital instrumentation lead to exciting new possibilities.

IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure strategy is designed to help clients integrate their growing intelligent business infrastructure with the necessary underlying design of a flexible, secure and seamlessly managed IT infrastructure. Our modular solutions help organizations reduce their operational costs, improve their service levels and proactively address a wide range of different types of business risks. Furthermore, our solutions are tailored to fit the unique needs and goals of any particular organization.

Today, the Dynamic Infrastructure strategy has been enhanced and extended in powerful new ways, backed by compelling new offerings and enhancements to current offerings, making it even more effective and cost-effective. These enhancements are available in four groups:

New service management capabilities within the datacenter that accelerate service creation and rollout via improved visibility (seeing the business), control (changing the way the infrastructure supports the business) and automation (increasing business agility and process consistency through intelligent, automated tools).
New service lifecycle management capabilities and integrations, ensuring service level targets are hit while minimizing the resources required to hit them, as accomplished via intelligent links between IT operations and IT development to address the full service lifecycle.
New industry-specific service management packages and enhancements, to help organizations achieve optimized, converged service management, on an industry-by-industry basis, by empowering them to address the special challenges that apply within those industries.
New services to help organizations develop, manage or optimize their own service/service delivery strategies.

The smarter, more automatic, more cost-effective data center

IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure strategy represents a compelling way to develop such an infrastructure. Via gradual, logical stages, themselves fulfilled by innovative new solutions and business processes, organizations can reduce their operational costs, improve their service levels and proactively address a wide range of different types of business risks. The first of these—new service management capabilities—tackles a fundamental challenge faced in the data center today: insufficient automation and interaction between systems, software and processes.

Consider that according to a 2007 IDC study, many organizations spend as much as eight times on maintenance costs what they spend on infrastructure costs per se. Furthermore, energy costs alone represent a tremendous and ongoing burden, translating into half of hardware costs every year, and that percentage is getting larger over time. Reducing these costs requires a new approach characterized by automation, to fulfill basic functions without requiring expensive human oversight, and integration, to connect and execute these automation functions in new contexts and thus multiply their value.

Toward this end, IBM now offers both innovative new tools and new versions of existing tools, which combined on a modular basis with each other, and existing infrastructural solutions, can help organizations achieve these complex goals in the data center.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1.1

In a highly-virtualized dynamic infrastructure, virtual servers are constantly being provisioned with the appropriate software stacks to empower and drive services/applications. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager is a best-in-class tool to achieve just that by automatically copying software stacks from a library of prepared disk images to the virtual servers.

Now, this solution has been enhanced to provision virtual servers even more quickly—reducing the delay required before those servers can begin generating business value. It is furthermore integrated more comprehensively with Systems Director 6.1.2, IBM's leading tool to manage virtual infrastructures generally, and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1.1 for Images helps with powerful new disk image management features and functions.

Integrations between Systems Director 6.1.2 and IBM Tivoli tools

Systems Director also now integrates more fully with IBM Tivoli IT Monitoring 6.2.2, to better reflect emerging changes in the infrastructure that could create a negative business impact and allow administrators to take proactive measures needed to reduce or eliminate that impact. Additionally, it integrates with IBM Tivoli Network Manager 3.8 to give Systems Director administrators easy access to basic network information.

IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization 7.1

Energy-reduction strategies must be driven by real-time, actionable intelligence. Just such intelligence is provided by IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization, a new solution that can create a heat-map of the data center to determine how energy is being used and how heat is being generated, empowering managers to take logical steps to reduce both.

IBM Tivoli Storage Flashcopy Manager

A second innovative new solution ideal for data center optimization, this offering helps IT organizations efficiently monitor and manage storage resources in order to drive down storage costs while driving up business resilience. Specifically, the tool can swiftly create application-aware snapshots of data, translating into faster, simpler, more continuous access to critical business information.

Optimization of the service lifecycle through links between IT Ops and IT Development

Part of the challenge in optimizing services, and service management, lies in the collaboration (or lack of it) between IT Development (which creates software used to drive services) and IT Operations (which deploys, monitors and manages the software and the infrastructure used to support it).

Because these two groups are often defined and managed in separate silos, lack of integration between them often impairs overall service management—and the business impact can be considerable. How considerable? Some studies suggest that up to half of new applications put in production are rolled back to earlier versions due to problems. This is certainly a red flag suggesting the need for immediate improvement in the way IT Development and IT Operations interact and the tools they use in the process.

IBM's response: enhanced service lifecycle management offerings, designed to create and optimize natural and effective cross-silo collaboration of exactly this type, in turn leading to enhanced services and service management generally. To wit, IBM Tivoli solutions often used on the operations side are now linked to IBM Rational solutions from the development side.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, for instance, now integrates with IBM Rational Test Lab Manager and IBM Tivoli Dependency and Discovery Manager, to accelerate the discovery and provisioning of the environments in which new software versions are tested, spurring shorter time-to-rollout and better software. IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM Tivoli Composite Applications Manager are now integrated to share performance data across contexts and thus pinpoint and resolve problems more quickly. IBM Rational Asset Manager and IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database integrate asset data across silos, allowing both silos to better understand asset details and change history over time. And IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager now links with IBM Rational ClearQuest, connecting and synchronizing trouble-ticket systems across IT operations and development.

Additionally, IBM Rational solutions have in several cases been enhanced with key new features, or integrated among themselves in new ways. Examples include

Rational System Architect, which now delivers better enterprise planning via more detailed information about relevant IT elements;
IBM Rational Quality Manager, a business intelligence tool used to identify and prioritize development risks;
New integration between IBM Rational Team Concert for System z and IBM Rational Developer for System z to increase development collaboration on that platform;
New integration between IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Asset Manager, to simplify overall development-side asset lifecycle management.

Converged, holistic service management in industry-specific packages

Across all industries, there is a growing need to converge business and IT assets, people and processes—rather than manage them as separate domains—in order to arrive at superior holistic service management and a better business outcome.

Also true, however, is that service management implies different challenges and complexities in different industries, and for this reason IBM made available several industry-specific service management packages earlier this year. Now, these packages have been augmented and extended even further, generally offering converged management in each case:

Healthcare

The new IBM Service Management for Healthcare package addresses some of the most pertinent issues facing healthcare providers today. In this sector, though costs must be contained, it's also increasingly important to keep the focus on patients and patient care, while also ensuring that sensitive information is protected and managed in order to comply with government regulations and internal security policies and preserve patient privacy. Helpful in the pursuit of these goals are the many IBM monitoring, security and compliance tools included in this package.

Energy and Utilities

The IBM SAFE Framework now includes support for Energy and Utilities to directly address industry-specific challenges in that sector. Increasingly, organizations in this space need an integrated, comprehensive perspective on how the energy grid is performing that links different assets and technologies, such as IP networks, SCADA, IT and smart meters. The IBM offering delivers just that, giving these organizations the information they need to maximize grid reliability and thus better serve their customers.

Banking

IBM's Service Management for Banking package has now been enhanced with new monitoring functionality to help banks verify that the infrastructure is hitting quantified business targets. Also now included are new security and compliance tools, delivering superior and simpler user identity management, fortified system access and simplified regulation compliance.

Chemicals and Petroleum

The IBM Service Management for Chemicals and Petroleum package has also been enhanced to give managers a holistic view of all assets across the organization, through end-to-end monitoring and event management, to ensure that the infrastructure is meeting or exceeding key performance indicators.

Services designed to enhance service delivery

Rounding out the new offerings from IBM: new services available to help organizations develop and enhance their service management and service delivery strategies. These services leverage the proven expertise and insights of IBM's long history of successful engagements to help clients drive up service levels while driving down integration costs.

Specifically, IBM IT Management Consulting Services can help clients establish an IT service strategy, via a defined portfolio and service catalog to simplify the way services are requested and received by end users, while minimizing the required resources. And IBM Remote Managed Infrastructure Services simplify how key platforms—including the IBM System i, Microsoft Exchange and others—are managed, reducing the work required of already time-challenged IT teams.