IBM today
introduced ground-breaking new software for managing data centers. The
new technology has the potential to dramatically cut the cost of
operations while speeding the deployment of new applications from weeks
to minutes.
The introduction of IBM’s new
VMControl product for enterprises, combined with IBM Tivoli software,
gives businesses for the first time a single point of control across
multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. It spans
UNIX/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks.
VMControl helps companies that have turned to virtualization – the
creation of multiple virtual servers or storage on a single physical
system – to reduce infrastructure costs, but have encountered new
struggles as they try to manage enterprises made up of disparate
platforms, each with their own virtualization technology.
VMControl allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to
be managed as a single entity. This approach – known as system pooling
– expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data
centers simplify complex management functions and better share and
prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory
and storage.
Centralizing control of virtualized environments brings new
intelligence to data center operations. Companies can manage their vast
pools of information and processing resources and parcel them out to
applications when and where they’re needed. This breakthrough
capability not only increases the overall capacity utilization of the
IT infrastructure to lower capital, operational and energy costs, and
improves application availability, but gives IT managers the
flexibility to adapt to new demands being prompted by the surge of data from internet-connected devices.
VMControl will also accelerate the deployment of new IT delivery
models, like cloud computing, which allows information and processing
resources to be tapped from afar.
“IBM has provided Winn-Dixie with many innovative solutions to help
us increase productivity, maximize our resources and save money for
more than 15 years,” said Charlie Weston, Group Vice President,
Information Technology for the Jacksonville, Fla.-based grocer. “We
are extremely confident that the launch of the VMControl product will
be equally as successful for IBM’s customers.”
The new product, together with IBM Tivoli software, helps companies
address and improve service and reduce cost and risk. IBM today
announced a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides
enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring
servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage
and network devices.
Whether businesses are moving to the cloud or looking to deliver IT
within the data center as cloud services, the sheer scale and velocity
of data growth as well as the now-permanent reality of having to do
more with less make VMControl essential for data centers. The combination of VMControl and Tivoli offers several benefits, such as:
Faster response to business needs: A reduction in
the skills, tools and tasks required to deploy new workloads. With
VMControl, companies can offer rapid deployments of new workloads (from
weeks to minutes) while maintaining control over IT resources.
Businesses can adapt to changing business needs and support new and
diverse types of workloads in accordance with service-level agreements.
More efficient use of resources: To configure,
operate and monitor physical and virtualized resources across multiple
IBM hardware platforms would otherwise require as many as dozens of
different management techniques. Buying, building and maintaining
disparate management tools take up significant portions of IT budgets.
VMControl reduces the management tools to one, cutting costs of
operations.
Awareness, consistency and predictability of operations:
Business can monitor, maintain and adjust the service levels required
by each computing workload handled by the pool of IT resources. It also
can help predict and react to system problems. By moving workloads
away from failing systems, VMControl can ensure workloads maintain
application availability and avoid unplanned down time.
Enabling Smarter Systems: VMControl’s ability to
dynamically move workloads and make adjustments allow IBM systems to be
more effectively utilized, use less power and cooling and provide a
much more resilient infrastructure.
The new product IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition supports IBM’s PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and
open x86 virtualization solutions. VMControl Enterprise Edition will
be available on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009.
Additional support for other platforms is planned for next year as part
of a dynamic infrastructure.
