IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager

IBM® Tivoli® Provisioning Manager, built on a Service Oriented Architecture, enhances usability for executing changes while keeping server and desktop software compliant. Tivoli Provisioning Manager helps organizations with provisioning, configuration and maintenance of servers and virtual servers, operating systems, middleware, applications, storage and network devices acting as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers. With this release of the Tivoli Provisioning Manager, users can benefit from significant ease of use enhancements including a new graphical user interface, better reporting and streamlined use scenarios that provide more out of the box value. Key functional areas of enhancement include:

• Improved discovery and reporting of datacenter resources

• Operating system imaging and bare metal provisioning

• Software distribution and patch management over a scalable secure infrastructure

• Automated deployment of servers through software templates

• Simplification and automation of datacenter tasks

• Compliance reporting and remediation.

• Integration with IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and IBM Tivoli Release Process Manager

These capabilities allow companies to manage the complete lifecycle of datacenter and distributed resources from initial provisioning to patching and configuration maintenance to resource repurposing or end of life. Through the automation of tasks, IT administrators can manage more resources with fewer people, allowing key skilled people to focus on activities that grow the business rather than serve to maintain it.

Companies can leverage these tools and automation capabilities against their existing infrastructure. Pre-built automation packages provide control and configuration of major vendors' products, while customized workflows can implement your company's best practices and procedures. Additional automation workflows can be obtained from the IBM Tivoli Open Process Automation Library (OPAL), an on-line repository where customers, business partners and ISVs publish and share best practices for automation. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager also contains a number of other new features designed to simplify use and improve time-to-value including a graphical user interface with role based views designed to simplify change execution tasks and pre-canned reports that can be easily modified to fit user needs.

Core Functions:

• Discovery of Resources

• Operating system provisioning

• Software deployment and configuration

• Automating Tasks through best practice automation workflows

• Auditing, Compliance and Remediation

• Common management Infrastructure for datacenter or distributed software management

• Storage Provisioning

• Change and Configuration Management

This product supports IBM's solutions for successful IT Lifecycle Management a core component of IBM's solution for Accelerating Deployment.

Learn how IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager can advance your shift from systems management to the more advanced IT service management. IT Service Management will help you to make ITIL actionable, reduce costs, manage complexity, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Web Replay - a Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, Tivoli Provisioning Manager, and Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Software feature – helps automate highly repetitive, mundane, and error-prone manual tasks, in an effort to free up resources for more high value business projects.

Web Replay works by enabling experts to capture their knowledge and make it available to others. With Web Replay a user can “record” the mouse clicks and actions going through any complex task. Afterwards, any user with the appropriate access can run the task. Operations that may require a whole series of clicks can be condensed down to a single push of a button.