IBM Delivers on Automation

Today, IBM is delivering the IBM Tivoli® Orchestrator and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager products, which are a key element in a new product family that includes IBM software, hardware, services, and IBM Global Services' intellectual capital, code-named "Project Symphony." Project Symphony offers a spectrum of value to our customers — allowing them to acquire on demand technology in the way that best suits their needs.

Orchestration allows companies to manipulate their IT environment in real time — according to defined business policies — to achieve desired business goals. Orchestration does this by sensing (autonomic technology!) an increase in the demand for resources and automatically taking action to re-allocate resources accordingly, and by provisioning resources throughout the entire system — hardware, software, applications, etc. By dynamically allocating capacity to applications that require it, it improves utilization of underutilized computing systems without investing in additional capacity, and helps companies' systems "sense and respond" to disruption or threats before they occur. In the future, orchestration of security, availability, and optimization will be used.

Recognizing the problems you can help solve with orchestration:

• Changes and new deployments are slow – manual-intensive processes imply that the IT organization is unable to keep pace with the business
• Lots of skilled people are necessary – even frequent and repetitive operational tasks require inputs from across the IT organization
• Capital costs are too high – the dynamic demands of some business applications force IT to overprovision compared to the average demand
• Failure to meet service level requirements – even with over provisioning, it is hard to meet the peak demands of e-business applications
• Lacks the assurance necessary for high volume applications – no consistent processes that guarantee resiliency and identity management
• Business priorities are not reflected in the infrastructure – there is no ability to dynamically move resources towards revenue producing applications from lower priority applications

Delivering customer benefits from orchestration

• No "rip and replace" – protects your existing investments, lowers implementation costs and creates a fast return on investment by utilizing existing hardware, software and network devices without rewiring or changing the network architecture
• Heterogeneous support – supports your existing IT infrastructure, and a wide range of industry platforms, operating systems and devices
• Support for Open Standards – uses open standards such as Java™ base standards, SNMP standards to monitor the servers, Web services standards such as XML and SOAP to provide integration and interoperability in the orchestration solution
• Customizable workflows – provides industry "best practice" workflows to enable rapid deployment and implementation, and the ability for you to easily incorporate your own best practices in the workflows
• Adopt at your own pace – you can implement and test at your pace using the manual, semi-automatic or automatic modes of operation
• Helps reduce costs – improve server utilization, and boost server-to-administrator ratios by automating and orchestrating all the steps necessary to deploy a complete solution into productive use

Using IBM policy-based orchestration, customers like the United States Tennis Association (USTA) are able to define their own business priorities to anticipate and meet demand peaks and service levels using the infrastructure that they already have. IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator helped the U.S. Open to allocate the right resources to the right processes at the right time, avoiding underutilization of expensive resources. And handling the spikes in demand from over 12 million fans checking on the Web site!

• Watch IBM TV for more details on the U.S. Open

Specifically, the U.S. Open used IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, during peak match times, to orchestrate the provisioning of all systems resources to the U.S. Open Web applications. At non-peak times, the excess Web capacity was dynamically "re-provisioned" to advance life science research in order to execute protein folding calculations — this, in an effort to help find a cure for cancer. This capability helped USTA officials focus on the servers that matter most to their business: the ones on the court rather than the ones running their Web infrastructure.