Data Center Automation

Help control costs and increase business agility by automating problem resolution

In complex, heterogeneous and geographically dispersed environments, one of the greatest challenges IT administrators face is pinpointing where problems lie within the infrastructure and addressing them as quickly as possible. For instance, in environments with multiple server types and different operating systems and databases running in a single business application, identifying where the actual problem is can be a daunting challenge. Losing availability of business-critical applications can translate to costly downtime or service level violations and damage to your hard-earned brand reputation.

Because of this, IT organizations are continually pressured to establish self-healing capabilities when performance issues and system failures occur. From the business side, IT must be ready to introduce new business applications quickly into the portfolio and on to the production floor with no service disruption. In short, IT managers need a way to consistently and efficiently resolve problems as they occur.

Through sophisticated automation capabilities for operating system provisioning, software distribution and patch management, IBM Tivoli® Provisioning Manager addresses these needs by enabling your team to:

• Manage multiple types of networks, storage devices and operating systems with ease.
• Automatically provision IT resources in response to changing business conditions.
• Control the costs of time-consuming resolution of problems, such as repairing damaged configurations.
• Maintain high availability of critical business services.

Solution Scenario

To demonstrate how Tivoli Provisioning Manager can help ease problem resolution, let’s examine an insurance application being used to verify customer policies. When users begin to experience lengthy response time delays, they report the problem via their service desk application. Once reported, the problem management team investigates, classifies the problem and uses a configuration management database to view which servers the application is running on, while using a monitoring tool and portal to view server performance.

At this point, the problem management team can see that a server is running out of CPU space and can open a request for change (RFC). The change management team would then receive the RFC, research the cause of the problem, define and approve changes as needed and use Tivoli Provisioning Manager to provision an additional CPU resource. In addition, when used in conjunction with Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, Tivoli Provisioning Manager can be programmed to reallocate resources as needed based on demand, according to policies that you define — ensuring that no manual step for reprovisioning is needed in the future.