To help you transform your businesses to on demand, IBM continues its multi-billion dollar commitment to delivering innovative solutions that align IT infrastructure with business priorities. IBM orchestration and provisioning solutions address the challenges you face with manual processes and substandard resource utilization. IBM IT service management automation packages leverage best practices workflows to automate orchestration and provisioning so you can decrease costs and improve resource utilization and response time.
Reduce costs
Manual processes make up the majority of a typical data center’s activities surrounding software installation, storage provisioning and network configuration tasks. The key to automating the execution of these manual processes is the ability to capture IT expert know-how and then re-use it. IBM captures best practice processes and procedures in reusable, dynamic, and automated IT service management automation packages.
An IT service management automation package consists of multiple automated workflows, or the automated steps that are dynamically executed to carry out a provisioning operation. Examples of workflows include:
- Allocating and removing servers to and from clusters
- Installing and uninstalling software and patches
- Configuring servers and network devices
- Provisioning Storage
- Performing bare-metal builds
- Test floor automation
The IBM orchestration and provisioning solution includes pre-built automation packages and workflows based on our extensive experience working with customers, and provides tools for customers and business partners to easily incorporate their own best practices into the IBM solution. Using automation packages and workflows can provide substantial cost savings -– reducing days of manual processes down to hours of automated execution.
Respond with speed
Many companies meet demanding service-level agreements by over provisioning IT resources based on worst-case, peak demands. This just-in-case provisioning results in very low overall utilization of IT resources. IBM on demand orchestration and provisioning technology can help you continually evaluate real-time IT resource status, anticipate trends and dynamically deploy or repurpose IT resources based on your business priorities. Automated decision making and provisioning is based on best practice policies and automation packages to help ensure your IT resources are applied where they’re needed most.
The value of leveraging IBM IT service management automation packages as a part of an automated orchestration and provisioning solution is substantial:
- Better alignment of IT resources to business goals and reduced capital and labor costs through intelligent, policy-based IT resource allocation.
- Automated rapid deployment and repurposing of complex data center environments.
- Improved service levels despite unpredictable demand.
- Improved productivity of IT staff, freed from manual repetitive tasks and decreased human error during installation and configuration processes.
- Accelerated adoption and assimilation of new revenue generating initiatives.
Put automation packages to work for you
Here is a list of some of the automation packages you can find in the IBM Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Catalog.
- Citrix - Tivoli in partnership with Citrix has developed an automated server provisioning solution for deploying servers in a MetaFrame XP Presentation Server farm and publishing the appropriate application – without manual intervention. The solution can deploy or redeploy additional servers to maintain required service levels.
- MS SQL Server and MS Exchange- These automation packages enable customers to Orchestrate and Provision Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server software by adding the application support to Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.
- Siebel - All knowledge associated with the manual process is integrated inside these automation packages. They are capable to play the same deployment sequence as manual operators. Automation of the process brings consistency, robustness and error free in the deployment of Siebel applications. See a demo
- VMware - This automation package enables customers to dynamically Orchestrate and Provision virtual servers: Create Virtual Server from template, install Operating System, install Application Software, set Appropriate IP Settings, set Appropriate Network Settings (Firewall, Switch, Router, etc.), notify Load Balancer, etc. setting it up for production.
- Develop your automation plan.
Preview the IBM Automation Assessment tool, then call your IBM representative to formulate next steps
- Create and modify a workflow (Demo) (5.75MB)
See how easy workflows can be created or changed with this user friendly tool