IBM eyes autonomic, Tivoli mix

New Orleans — Leveraging its On Demand computing strategy for integrated, flexible business processes, IBM is blending its Tivoli management software and autonomic technology to enable businesses to adapt to changing conditions, an IBM executive stressed at the Planet Tivoli @ developerWorks Live conference here on Wednesday.

IBM’s Robert LeBlanc, general manager of Tivoli Software, touted the combination of IBM’sTivoliplatform and autonomic computing for self-managing systems as enabling businesses to proactively manage IT. He also noted several show-related announcements, including IBM moving its directory products to Tivoli jurisdiction and the unveiling of the Tivoli Autonomic Monitoring Engine, which will enable ISVs to embed autonomic capabilities in their applications in addition to being part of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring 5.1 product. The software is designed to provide self-managing capabilities.

LeBlanc said the days are over when there was plenty of time to adapt systems to change; new services must be provided quickly. “If you have a Web site and all of sudden you have a spike in traffic, you have to respond in real time,” he said. You’ve got to bring variability into IT systems,” he added.

CIOs, according to LeBlanc, must balance infrastructure needs and costs and maximize resources such as storage utilization. “Bridging between IT and business is becoming critical,” said LeBlanc.

IBM’s autonomic computing strategy provides predictability, he said, adding, “It’s all about moving from this reactive mode that we’re in to being more predictive and proactive.”

With the new Tivoli Business Manager product, for example, problems are resolved in an autonomic fashion, according to IBM officials. Additionally, the Tivoli Service Level Advisor shows when an application is approaching service-level agreement breach.

IBM also is integrating products such as the Tivoli ID Manager, Access Manager with IBM WebSphere Portal. Portal technology, LeBlanc said, increases challenges in front-end interaction and raises issues as far as what must get through a firewall.

To execute its On Demand strategy in heterogeneous environments, IBM is supporting open standards. “Right now, we support more open standards than any other systems management vendor and we now fully support the Linux environment,” LeBlanc said.

Touting the Tivoli Workload Scheduler Manager product, an IT official at Goldman Sachs presented a brief case study on his company’s use of the product and planned migration to it. “Under our current scheduling platform, we’re running 65 million jobs a year,” said David Reilly, director of technology operations at Goldman Sachs.

The company’s current technology has caused delays and requires lots of time to keep the application running, which Reilly said was unacceptable. TheTivoliproduct was selected as a replacement after Goldman Sachs looked at 13 different products, Reilly said. “Going into this, we actually didn’t think Tivoli Workflow Scheduler would come out on top, but it did,” said Reilly. “First of all, the actual design of the product is a great fit for the syndicated nature of our business,” he added.

LeBlanc also hailed the forthcoming introduction of aTivolizSeries performance management product, providing performance management for IBM mainframes. It is due this fall, according to the company.

Also appearing during Wednesday’s presentation was Wyatt Starnes, CEO from Tripwire, a systems management vendor that plans to use the autonomic engine in its products to integrate with theTivoliframework.