Data Center Automation

IT Resource Lifecycle Management

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Automate and optimize IT resource lifecycle management with IBM solutions

As IT infrastructures grow in size, cost and complexity, today’s organizations are realizing that a comprehensive lifecycle management solution is far more than mission-critical — it’s business-critical. In fact, most IT professionals would agree that failure to take a holistic, automated view of lifecycle management will inevitably — and negatively — affect total cost of ownership (TCO), regulatory compliance and operational efficiency. The lack of common, repeatable and coordinated lifecycle processes adds to the overall TCO of IT infrastructure.

Noncompliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) can result in severe civil or even criminal penalties. Compliance issues with these regulations can arise through security vulnerabilities regarding users as well as inaccurate or out-of-date inventories of software licenses.

Finally, a lack of the correct software and tools for efficient, productive maintenance can lead to a costly “ripple effect” across the enterprise, damaging long-term initiatives and the strategic posture of the organization.

In short, organizations need an integrated, automated and scalable solution to manage the complete IT infrastructure lifecycle end to end, including server and client platforms, network environments and data stores.

IT Resource Lifecycle

IBM Tivoli® software provides a range of lifecycle management solutions, all based on a proven approach to task automation and process integration. With IBM products and services, IT organizations can leverage more resources with fewer people, allowing key skilled personnel to focus on activities that grow the business rather than just maintaining it. The result is a highly efficient and productive lifecycle management solution designed to fully align business service goals with IT operations by:

Providing comprehensive, automated lifecycle management across multiple platforms and environments, helping to improve the quality of business services while lowering TCO.
Simplifying the growing complexity of virtualization, thereby minimizing management overhead while maximizing resource usage.
Delivering solutions across all platforms, helping to minimize investments in multiple tool sets.
Utilizing the IBM Service Management vision and architecture for improved data integrity, increased product integration and reduced infrastructure support requirements.

Deployment phase

IBM solutions focus on reducing the effort, cost and number of images required to deploy and manage operating systems for IT infrastructure assets such as PCs and servers.

Key benefits:

Allow remote deployment and management of operating systems (OS), enabling zero-touch installations across the network.
Use a single core image to support multiple hardware types.
Support multiple deployment media to fit different environments, including Preboot Execution Environment (PXE), Microsoft® Windows® Preinstallation Environment (PE) and CD/DVD installations.
Provide security-hardened, bare-metal provisioning and strong cryptography protocols to prevent interference with the provisioning process.

IT Resource Lifecycle

Monitoring phase

Tracking compliance, optimizing performance and ensuring availability are mission-critical goals during the monitoring phase. IBM solutions are designed to ensure deep visibility into IT operations while helping to reduce the complexities of monitoring heterogeneous environments.

Key benefits:

Provide operators with access to availability data that can be used to identify problems at an early stage.
Present rich visualization of information across the organization from the central vantage point of a unified browser-based interface.
Automate scans of servers and desktop systems, which can help reduce the cost and time associated with manual security checks.
Identify software security vulnerabilities before they result in costly damage from security incidents.
Proactively manage and verify increasingly complex software license compliance.
Reduce unnecessary license fees by identifying software inventory with no or low-use activity.

IT Resource Lifecycle

Managing phase

With IBM solutions, organizations can support true, autonomic computing across the entire enterprise through software, server, storage and network provisioning.

Key benefits:

Improve first-time success ratios through autodiscovery and inventory.
Quickly, accurately and securely deploy operating system, software, configuration and patches to heterogeneous assets across different platforms.
Enable a policy-based approach to task automation through workflow.
Identify changes through compliance scans, with deviations automatically remediated back to desired standards.
Improve the utilization of existing hardware, software, storage and network devices without rewiring or changing the network architecture.
Orchestrate the provisioning of on demand business application environments to provide capacity as needed.

IT Resource Lifecycle

Retirement phase

Upon retirement, Tivoli IT Resource Lifecycle Offering provides solutions for data protection as well as backup and recovery, helping to ensure that data is not lost or compromised in the transition to new platforms. Asset closing issues, such as end-of-life rationalization and business process change, are also addressed.

Key benefits:

Protect key corporate information with invisible, real-time file replication.
Capture file changes when they occur to help protect against data corruption or file loss.
Increase business continuity by shortening backup and recovery times and maximizing application availability with advanced data restoration technology.
Employ a hierarchy of storage to increase efficiencies and conserve resources.
Facilitate internal and regulatory compliance with innovative security features.

IT Resource Lifecycle