Web infrastructure orchestration

The Business Challenge

This evolution towards on demand e-business requires an operating environment which can seamlessly manage the allocation of IT resources, processes, and users as one cooperative entity and has led to a tremendous new opportunity: Web infrastructure orchestration.

Today, many companies want to get more from their existing IT infrastructures. They want to optimize manually-intensive processes and environments to adjust for rapidly-changing business conditions, as well as keep pace with dynamic and often fluctuating demands of key business applications without incurring overly-expensive capital costs. They must be able to:

• Manage service levels
• Increase resource utilization
• Reduce IT costs
• Respond to business changes quickly and with flexibility
• Manage increasing amounts of risk

"Access (in particular, the Internet) has changed workload levels from relatively predictable to spiky - forcing enterprises to overprovision their servers. Roughly 75 percent of server CPU power is not being used at any one time worldwide."

-- Gartner Group

The Business Requirements

To meet these challenges, organizations need an IT infrastructure which is safe, available, reliable, optimized, and flexible. In order to achieve this, they need to ensure:

• Web and application infrastructure is always available and ready to address consumer demands, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, year round
• Web and application infrastructure is optimized, and maximum utilization is obtained from new and existing investments
• A web and application infrastructure which can quickly recover - taking minutes instead of hours or days
• Peaks in demand are met quickly and effectively and without business disruption
• The infrastructure is scalable, allowing it grow and shrink with changing demands without sacrificing manageability of complex, heterogeneous environments
• The integrity and privacy of customer information is maintained. Transactions need to be executed in an environment which customers feel is safe and secure

IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration Solution

The IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration solution allows customers to utilize the resources allocated to processes where they support a specific customer's business requirements most efficiently. It does this by proactively sensing and responding to peaks in demand, then reallocating IT resources to the most critical business processes based on the organization's specific business policies.

The IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration solution is a key offering of IBM's Intelligent Infrastructure Management family of products. It is a pre-tested, pre-integrated orchestration solution of Web and application servers on IBM eServer BladeCenter with optional implementation services. It enables customers to simplify the management and consolidate IBM WebSphere servers and applications. The family provides customers with flexible solutions at a variety of entry points that meet their unique needs and allow them to transition to an on demand environment.

This offering comprises IBM hardware, software, and optional services, including:

• IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator
• IBM WebSphere
• IBM DB2
• IBM eServer BladeCenter
• IBM Total Storage
• Optional implementation services and solution testing/integration

Because IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration is based on IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator it is scalable and extensible to existing heterogeneous environments. The IBM eServer BladeCenter server provides additional value by allowing Web server capacity to be added simply and affordably, addressing key issues such as space constraints, ease of deployment, manageability, scalability, and performance. (See the "IBM Solution" tab for more detail on the component products).

Key Advantages

Key competitive advantages of the IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration solution:

• Packaged Intelligence
• Best practices and policies for use with unique blade architecture and devices, to workflows and policies for WebSphere
• Fast time to value and flexibility
• Easy to implement - Integrated and pre-tested: implementation time 4X improvement
• Based upon the IBM Tivoli Orchestrator product
• Scalable and extensible to Heterogeneous Environments
• Optimization of resources - often doubling utilization
• Designed to fit your business
• Policy based to better adapt to your environment