POWER7 and Integrated Service Management: An IT/Ops Dream Team

Superior service management and reduced costs

Service Management in Action With the advent of the recently announced POWER7, IBM dramatically enhanced its POWER processor architecture. And when combined with the IBM Integrated Service Management portfolio, POWER7 represents a great way to develop the dynamic infrastructure today's organizations need most.

POWER7-based systems, such as the new IBM POWER7xx hosts, boast:

Simplified management and automation. Picture running up to a thousand virtual servers on a single host!
Superior energy management and granularity of control.
Higher system availability, via new forms of concurrent maintenance and proactive reliability features.

And when combined with the IBM Integrated Service Management platform, the argument for POWER7 just gets stronger. Integrated Service Management solutions deliver the visibility, control and automation needed to improve service levels, reduce costs and manage business risks of many kinds—all essential aspects of a truly dynamic infrastructure.

More specifically in the case of POWER7, service management solutions can:

Improve the visibility of system resources and energy utilization of the POWER7 infrastructure, to increase asset reliability.
Improve the control of the POWER7 infrastructure, to spur service levels and reduce costs.
Improve the automation of the POWER7 infrastructure, to get the fastest, most consistent, most cost-effective implementation of everyday tasks.

The result? Next-generation services can be more quickly and easily deployed, and more easily and cost-effectively managed.

This, in turn, translates into generally higher business agility; when the business needs to change direction, the infrastructure can make that happen in a shorter amount of time, using fewer resources. Customer satisfaction, market share and revenues can all be enhanced as a result—contributing directly to an enhanced business bottom line.

To understand how this can happen at your organization, begin with the idea that integrated service management solutions increase the business value of POWER7 in two distinct ways: by helping to manage those systems directly, and by helping to manage the many services they support.

Manage POWER7 systems using Integrated Service Management

"IBM's Integrated Service Management solutions deliver the visibility, control and automation needed to improve service levels, reduce costs and manage business risks of many kinds—all essential aspects of a truly dynamic infrastructure." Getting best results from POWER7 systems means understanding what's happening with them in real time—and at any necessary level of abstraction: hypervisors, logical partitions, hardware components, energy utilization, applications, services and so forth.

Integrated Service Management solutions deliver. Only IBM supports end-to-end application and resource management for POWER7 workloads—a single, integrated platform of visibility, control and automation that can address systems and all of their elements.

Furthermore, IBM supports licensing across the portfolio in such a way as to help customers minimize costs by paying only for the functionality they actually need. Sub-capacity pricing, for instance, means that costs accrued reflect the actual capacity in use. And on POWER7 systems—which have tremendous expansion potential—that translates into impressive savings indeed, while also building a sound foundation for future growth.

What’s more, IBM's integrated service management solutions deliver comprehensive monitoring of POWER7 systems in ways the competition simply can't match: more granularity, smarter monitoring and energy management and best-in-class discovery.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring and IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management, for example, are ideal monitoring tools. By integrating with IBM Active Energy Manager—an extension of IBM Systems Director—they enable monitoring of not just energy consumption, but also thermal changes likely to affect host performance and stability and generate a negative business impact. If thermal conditions exceed predetermined thresholds, alerts can be sent to appropriate team members, notifying them of actions to be taken and suggesting how and where to implement them.

Thanks to predictive trending and historical data collection, these monitoring tools also make it possible to leverage past information to get a better future outcome. These features are particularly helpful for faster and more accurate troubleshooting, capacity planning and service level reporting—keeping key hosts, and all their services, as available as possible, and generating business value in proportion.

Tivoli Monitoring tools are also exceptionally configurable, supporting task-specific views and workflows that correspond to the specific duties of managers using them. And, when integrated with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM), they can be used to track not just performance, but costs. TUAM collects, analyzes and bills based on usage and costs of shared Power resources based on centralized resource usage data collection from the Power Hypervisor. TUAM provides detailed information and reports about the use of shared resources and transforms raw IT data into business information for cost allocation that spans business units, cost centers, services, applications and users. This means costs including energy become much easier to determine in any necessary granularity.

Directly addressing that challenge: IBM Tivoli Application Dependency and Discovery Manager. This solution can perform a deep discovery of all the various dependencies that comprise composite applications, including physical elements such as memory, processors and IO resources. Then, by generating a dependency map, it helps application managers establish and visualize performance both of the application overall, and every point in its dependency chain, in a centralized manner. This information, in turn, can be used to pinpoint why a composite application running on POWER7 systems isn't performing up to expectations.

IBM Tivoli solutions are also an excellent way to leverage the extraordinary possibilities of the POWER7 architecture to create a truly next-generation service delivery platform: a cloud. To fulfill the promise of maximum business agility and minimum attention from IT, clouds require extreme availability, as well as automation and resource allocation implemented and controlled at a deep level.

And IBM Tivoli offerings, as orchestrated by IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager (TSAM), can make that possible. Via out-of-the-box use cases, pre-integrated service management functionality and delivery options and advanced, self-service features such as service catalogs, IBM Tivoli offerings help you get the best results from a POWER 7-based cloud—in remarkably little time, with minimal ongoing manual attention required. TSAM can also provide TUAM the metered data to enable accurate billing for services consumed.

Manage POWER7-hosted services and IT tasks using IBM Tivoli

Beyond directly managing POWER7 systems themselves, IBM Tivoli solutions are also an incredibly effective way to manage a wide range of crucial business services and IT tasks.

In fact, almost 500 different IBM Tivoli service management solutions are available to accomplish that—and more appear every year. Furthermore, many of them are already optimized specifically for the POWER7 platform, or are being optimized, to increase overall performance and scalability for even the most demanding workloads and operating environments.

Security

As security threats have become more sophisticated and more complex, security solutions have as well—and today, security architectures based on a combination of such solutions require more processing power than ever before, to shield organizations to the fullest possible extent.

Consider, for instance, how intrusion prevention, data protection, denial of service protection and Web application protection all comprise typical elements of a security architecture. Solutions assigned to those domains—IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager, for instance—will usually rely on rapid encryption/decryption in order to work.

To perform such processor-intensive tasks best, they should ideally be run on best-in-class systems such as POWER7 systems, which boast massive multi-core architectures, for the highest possible performance. And in future, IBM expects to deliver a special Protocol Analysis Module for even better results from the IBM Power line.

Storage

A similar case can be made for storage—a critical resource virtually every application and service will require, throughout the IT infrastructure. IBM Tivoli solutions such as the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) family can help organizations optimally protect storage-based data at every point in its lifecycle through policy-driven backup and restoration features.

Here, too, high-end hardware such as POWER7 represent an ideal match for the Tivoli solution. For instance, thanks to the exceptional performance of the POWER7 processor, CPU-intensive backup features like deduplication — needed to minimize the storage required for any given backup process, as well as its time window—will run much more quickly.

As the organization grows, and its backup/restoration requirements become more complex, POWER7 systems can deliver improved scalability for TSM as well —allocating more resources when required to finish backup sequences and thus increasing the odds of meeting the terms of service level agreements.

Finally, POWER7 performance allows organizations to run multiple TSM servers in parallel on one host. This consolidated architecture is easier and faster to manage, as well as boasting better resource utilization per TSM server.

Performance management

Organizations such as communications service providers (CSPs) have incredibly diverse, complex infrastructures. And the expectations of their users tend to be exceptionally high as well, for each service provided.

Toward meeting those expectations, many CSPs have turned to leading solutions such as IBM Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager to isolate and resolve performance bottlenecks—wherever they may occur—and thus generate the intelligence needed for a quick and effective fix. In many cases, in fact, that fix can occur proactively, before customers even notice a problem.

POWER7 systems are a superior platform for the Tivoli Netcool family. Because Netcool tools have been specifically optimized for POWER7, every feature and function Netcool provides, such as streaming analytics, will be rendered even more quickly.

This will mean even higher performance and uptime of all the services provided by the infrastructure, and a correspondingly enhanced customer experience — both of which are mission-critical goals in the ultracompetitive CSP business arena.

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