Data Center Automation

Automate provisioning to help optimize data center resources and reduce complexity in the virtual environment.

It is not uncommon to lose track of what has been deployed — and where — causing many organizations to put even more management systems in place. Add to that the challenge of:

• A shortage of expert skills needed to manage the ever-growing complexity of virtual and physical IT environments.
• A proliferation of siloed management tools within the IT infrastructure.
• Flattening IT budgets.
• Rising operational management costs.

IBM Tivoli® Provisioning Manager helps overcome these obstacles by delivering the functions that IT managers need to better manage data center resources. The software helps you simplify the management of virtual environments — including technologies such as virtualization software (VMware), IBM AIX® oper-ating systems and logical partitions (LPARs).

IT organizations today are increasingly pressured to reduce data center costs and increase agility, while simultaneously being asked to deploy multiple business-critical applications, maintain legacy applications and meet strict service level agreements (SLAs). To meet these objectives, many organizations have adopted virtualization technologies to consolidate and maximize use of servers, applications and storage systems and to reduce staffing costs associated with managing the availability of business services. While virtualization delivers numerous IT efficiencies, virtual environments also bring greater complexity and challenges as IT managers struggle to track, monitor, manage and troubleshoot all the virtual and physical resources spread out over the IT infrastructure.

Solution Scenario

Tivoli Provisioning Manager can greatly ease the burden of provisioning in the virtual environment, allowing you to automatically partition and departition servers as needed. It is especially useful in large environments that use consistent configurations for provisioning multiple devices in dispersed locations across the infrastructure. Traditionally, provisioning a server with a new operating system would involve a series of time-consuming manual steps, from creating the container and virtual machine to configuring the virtual machine and provisioning its applications. With Tivoli Provisioning Manager, you can easily — and automatically — perform all these steps with “one-button automation,” helping your IT operations perform consistent and efficient provisioning every time. The results: lower provisioning and management costs, and optimization of server resources.