Executive Summary

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IBM Systems Director Proposal

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary......................................................................................................................1

Our Understanding of Your Goals.............................................................................................1Our Approach to Meeting Your Goals.......................................................................................1Solution Overview.....................................................................................................................2Why IBM?..................................................................................................................................3

Executive Summary - IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac for IBM Systems Director...........................................................................................................................4

Our Understanding of Your Goals.............................................................................................4Our Approach to Meeting Your Goals.......................................................................................4Solution Overview.....................................................................................................................4Why IBM?..................................................................................................................................5

IBM Systems Director...................................................................................................................6

Highlights...................................................................................................................................6Becoming more efficient.....................................................................................................7Easy to use.........................................................................................................................7IBM Systems Director Editions provide Pre-packaged Offerings to Meet Your Needs......7Managing virtualization.......................................................................................................9Managing energy................................................................................................................9Managing the network.......................................................................................................10Integrated service management.......................................................................................10Building a dynamic infrastructure for a Smarter Planet™.................................................11

IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac for IBM Systems Director...........13

Highlights.................................................................................................................................13Providing efficient and professional implementation of a superior resource administration capability...........................................................................................................................13Helping to improve availability and reduce costs..............................................................13Enabling improved use and effective decision making.....................................................14Offering a well-planned implementation of the Systems Director framework...................14Why IBM?..........................................................................................................................14

© Copyright IBM Corporation, 2010. Use or disclosure of data contained on this page is subject to the restriction in the disclosure statement of this document.

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Figures

Figure 1. IBM Systems Director simplifies the management of physical and virtual resources across the breadth of IBM systems...........................................................................................7

Figure 2. IBM Systems Director, together with the high-performance IBM System x, delivers cost savings through virtualized environments...............................................................................11

Figure 3. IBM Systems Director supports a wide variety of platforms including IBM Power Systems servers such as the IBM Power 780........................................................................11

Figure 4. IBM Systems Director for Linux on System z helps to simplify and reduce IT infrastructure...........................................................................................................................12


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Executive Summary

Our Understanding of Your Goals

Today a crisis is emerging in many data centers. Costs of administration and energy are growing rapidly and can exceed the spending on the server hardware by a factor of two or three times. CIOs need solutions to reduce these expenses.

Virtualization is a key tool in enhancing resource utilization in the effort to reduce costs, but it presents the data center staff with new challenges and complexities. For example, a common problem is “virtual server sprawl.” Virtual servers are created and continue to exist though no longer needed or used, leading to wasted resources and potential security concerns.

Customers need a systems management solution that addresses today’s challenges: reducing administrative workload, control energy usage and manage virtualized as well as physical resources. The use of IBM® Systems Director can help reduce system administration and energy costs by nearly 30 percent in a typical data center.1

Our Approach to Meeting Your Goals

IBM has addressed these challenges with a leadership multiplatform management tool: IBM Systems Director

IBM Systems Director is designed to be easy to use, deploy and learn for quick time to value. Staff training time is reduced by use of consistent interfaces and task wizards.

The automation of systems management tasks, which Systems Director provides, can reduce costs by decreasing the administrative burden of routine maintenance by creating an infrastructure that can respond to events without direct intervention.

The platform management foundation provided by IBM Systems Director streamlines the way physical and virtual systems are managed. Leveraging industry standards, IBM Systems Director supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM platforms. Through a single user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for visualizing managed systems, determining how these systems relate to one another while identifying their individual status, thus helping to correlate technical resources with business needs.

A key feature of IBM Systems Director is IBM Systems Director VMControl. VMControl represents a transformation from managing virtualization to using virtualization to better manage your IT infrastructure. VMControl simplifies the management of virtual environments across multiple virtualization technologies and hardware platforms, freeing you from “silos of virtualization” and delivering enterprise-wide visibility and control. A leading multiplatform virtualization


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management solution, VMControl is now available in three Editions (Express, Standard or Enterprise) to best match your virtualized environment.

To get the benefits of virtualization, energy and network management, you need “state-of-the-art” tools to view and effectively manage systems. IBM Systems Director offers among the best hardware management tools in the industry. IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™ is a unique energy management software tool that can provide a single view of the actual energy usage across the systems and facilities within your data center. It measures, monitors and manages the energy to help you understand and control data center energy consumption and costs. IBM Systems Director Network Control provides integration of server, storage, and network management for virtualization environments across platforms. IBM Systems Director Network Control will manage, monitor, and configure vendor-based network devices, leveraging existing IBM Systems Director functionality and integration of vendor applications.

The platform management provided by IBM Systems Director can be integrated with IBM Tivoli® enterprise service management for a total IT service management strategy. IBM Systems Director is a strategic platform management tool that grows with the needs of a business.

Solution Overview

IBM Systems Director is a platform management solution that is entitled for use at no additional charge with each IBM system. The software can be downloaded from the Web and used on IBM systems (subscription and support are purchased separately).

IBM Systems Director Editions provide options to select the level of leading management solutions from IBM based on your needs—from basic hardware management to more advanced cross-enterprise management. IBM Systems Director Editions are packaged to make it easier and more cost effective to purchase the features needed to manage servers, storage and networks in your data center.

IBM’s integrated management solutions—from platform management through service management—drive greater operational management efficiencies, breaking down the barriers that get in the way to achieving a dynamic infrastructure. IBM Systems Director Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions provide an integrated set of tools to help IT organizations address major concerns associated with managing both physical and virtual server infrastructures. Systems Director Editions reduce operation complexity, improve the efficiency of IT staff and systems, and control costs while meeting business requirements for service delivery.

Integrating physical and virtual resource management, IBM Systems Director provides the core capabilities required for basic management, which means instant out-of-the-box business value. These common tasks include discovery, inventory, configuration, system health, monitoring, updates, event notification and automation across managed systems.

IBM Systems Director can manage a wide variety of IBM and non-IBM servers, including select System z®, Power Systems™, System x®, BladeCenter®, IBM System Storage™, non-IBM x86 servers, SNMP- and CIM-based devices.


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Why IBM?

IBM Systems Director helps address the total cost of ownership by allowing management of the entire data center—physical and virtual—efficiently, from one place, with one interface, with the click of a button. It manages a broad spectrum of systems—both IBM and non-IBM—and a variety of software and virtualization environments from the same, consistent interface.

Designed to simplify and streamline systems management, the features of IBM Systems Director help reduce the administrative costs in running a data center and can result in substantial savings1.

IBM Systems Director provides a strategic platform management tool that grows with the needs of a business. The new IBM Systems Director Editions provide options to select the level of leading management solutions from IBM based on your needs—from basic hardware management to more advanced cross-enterprise management. The platform management provided by IBM Systems Director can be integrated with IBM Tivoli enterprise service management for a total IT service management strategy.

1 Source: “Value Proposition for IBM Systems Director: Challenges of Operational Management for Enterprise Server Installations,” Management Brief, September 2008, © International Technology Group, Los Altos, California.


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Executive Summary - IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac for IBM Systems Director

Our Understanding of Your Goals

Monitoring and managing the growing complexity of data center components can quickly add up to more time and money than your organization can spare. But you can’t afford the consequences of inefficient management—including potential downtime and poorly utilized resources within your IBM® System x® server environment. The challenge is to simplify systems management without putting additional burdens on your budget and staff.

Our Approach to Meeting Your Goals

IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac® for IBM Systems Director provides quick and efficient, installation and configuration of near-real-time monitoring and management capabilities and key features. An integrated, cross-platform management tool, IBM Systems Director can help enhance availability and efficiency while driving savings across your organization. A central, easy-to-use overview interface can give you greater visibility into utilization of your physical and virtual resources, enabling you to better manage power usage and expenses. Systems Director enables seamless integration of IBM systems with the total infrastructure, as well as integration with enterprise systems management solutions, such as IBM Tivoli® software.

Solution Overview

IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac for IBM Systems Director enables quick and efficient, offsite implementation of the Systems Director management application within data center environments, with minimal risks of downtime or disruptions.

This is a fixed deliverable service that:

Provides scope for cross-platform management across IBM systems

Helps install and configure the Systems Director framework

Readies the nodes running on IBM System x

Creates inventories for searching, collecting and viewing information

Enables automation plans for resource, process monitoring, alerts notifications and resource threshold setting


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Why IBM?

IBM has extensive technical expertise working with System x, coupled with strong back-end support. This, along with our comprehensive project management skills and experience gained from numerous successful engagements, helps ensure a smooth, timely and efficient implementation of the Systems Director management application.


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IBM Systems Director

Dramatically reduce operational complexity and costs. Significantly increase agility and efficiency.

Figure 1. IBM Systems Director simplifies the management of physical and virtual resources across the breadth of IBM systems

Highlights Unifies the essential management of IBM servers, storage and network devices

delivering a consistent look and feel for common management tasks that reduces operational complexity

Integrates IBM's best-of-breed virtualization capabilities to provide new ways to simplify the management of physical and virtual platform resources

Reduces energy costs and usage by monitoring and managing the energy and cooling needs of servers and storage

Easy integration with enterprise service management tools from Tivoli® as well as other third-party providers

IBM® Systems Director Editions provide options to select the level of leading management solutions based on your needs

Today a crisis is emerging in many data centers. Spending on administration and energy is growing rapidly and now exceeds the spending on the server hardware for many enterprises. IBM® Systems Director is a unified platform management solution to help control costs by managing energy, virtualization and overall systems


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operations. It can help reduce system administration and energy costs by nearly 30 percent in a typical data center2.

IBM Systems Director is an easy-to-use point-and-click platform management tool that is entitled for use with IBM systems. It streamlines the way physical and virtual systems are managed across multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM platforms.

Becoming more efficient

IBM Systems Director helps administrators automate data center operations. Built-in automation capabilities enable IT administrators to schedule updates and configuration changes to proactively avoid problems, and reduce the administrative burden of routine maintenance. Featuring simplified discovery and automated configuration, compute resources can be quickly added for management. Powerful grouping capabilities with nesting of resources help organize resources for efficient operation. A simplified interface is used to create action plans for events that can trigger automatic responses such as e-mail notification or task execution.

To help drive system compliance and consistency, the update management feature can automatically notify users of out-of-date systems and provide simplified tasks to download and install updates.

Easy to use

IBM Systems Director features a user-friendly, Web-based interface that helps guide administrators with an extensive array of wizards. Resource views of systems and groups clearly show relationships between physical and virtual resources. Customizable dashboards summarize critical resources and provide drilldown for detailed status.

Quick “time to value” is provided by simplified deployment, installation and update process with default and custom installation options. A welcome page informs and educates administrators with summarized status reports and tutorials and assistance with common tasks.

IBM Systems Director helps simplify IT operations by providing a consistent management interface across the breadth of IBM systems: System x®, BladeCenter®, Power Systems™, System z® and select IBM storage and network solutions. Non-IBM x86 servers can also be managed by IBM Systems Director3.

IBM Systems Director Editions provide Pre-packaged Offerings to Meet Your Needs

IBM offers a complete set of platform and enterprise service management solutions that are designed to reduce complexity, manage virtualization, and manage energy

2 Source: “Value Proposition for IBM Systems Director: Challenges of Operational Management for Enterprise Server Installations,” Management Brief, September 2008, © International Technology Group, Los Altos, California.3 Use of IBM Systems Director with non-IBM systems requires purchase of an agent license.


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of your IBM servers throughout the operational life cycle. IBM Systems Director Editions provide choices to select the package of simple-to-use automated management solutions from IBM based on your needs—from basic hardware management to more advanced cross-enterprise management. IBM Systems Director Editions are packaged to make it easier and more cost effective to purchase the features needed to manage servers, storage and networks in your data center. They let you seamlessly scale up as your infrastructure evolves and address major concerns associated with managing both physical and virtual environments.

IBM Systems Director Editions are management solutions that helps you reduce operational complexity, improve the efficiency of IT staff and systems, and help control costs while meeting business requirements for service delivery.

IBM Systems Director Express Edition includes a set of management tools that can reduce operational complexity by providing a clear view of the relationships and health status of IT system components. IBM Systems Director Express Edition provides an affordable foundation for systems management. It provides the integrated tools needed to efficiently visualize and communicate the relationships of physical and virtual systems that are discovered, monitor their health, define and receive threshold alerts, and update system firmware and operating environments. Built-in automation capabilities enable IT administrators to schedule updates and configuration changes to proactively avoid problems, and reduce the administrative burden of routine maintenance.

IBM Systems Director Standard Edition includes features that can reduce the time and effort for workload deployment, as well as optimize energy usage and capacity. IBM Systems Director Standard Edition includes all of the capabilities of the Express Edition, and adds advanced deployment, monitoring and control features under the same console. With Systems Director Standard Edition, you can create and deploy virtual images that encapsulate an operating environment as well as any middleware and applications, while automatically configuring the storage attached network (SAN). Clients who may be facing energy cost or capacity concerns get the benefit of extensive electrical power and thermal monitoring capabilities across the data center. This edition also expands the discovery and health monitoring capabilities of the Express Edition to include networking systems.

IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition enables superior performance and availability management, and the automated resource balancing required for a dynamic infrastructure. IBM Systems Director Enterprise Edition includes all of the capabilities of the Express and Standard editions and adds tools for more comprehensive availability and performance management, and more options for rapidly deploying and maintaining virtual server environments. This Systems Director edition with IBM's leading integrated management solutions—including the cross-platform virtualization management capability of VMControl, the energy efficiencies of Active Energy Manager and selected Tivoli enterprise service management tools—drives greater operational management efficiencies. With the Enterprise Edition, you have the flexibility to deploy workloads into a pool of virtual system resources across multiple physical servers (called “system pools”), which can be managed with the simplicity of managing a single system. Troubleshooting is enhanced by including application status, identification of changes in the environment and predictive analysis of capacity. A built-in data warehouse and reporting enable you to analyze both real-time status and historical trends together.


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IBM Systems Director's comprehensive systems management tools address today's challenges to ensure high availability and quality of services to meet business requirements for service delivery. To get the benefits of virtualization, energy and network management, you need “state-of-the-art” tools to view and effectively manage systems. IBM Systems Director offers among the best hardware management tools in the industry.

Managing virtualization

Virtualization has transformed IT and how it relates to business. Virtualized solutions unlock IT resources to achieve business goals by enhancing resource utilization, improving service levels and improving availability. Virtualization benefits extend beyond the data center by enabling faster time to market for new services based upon market demands. IBM Systems Director provides integrated virtualization management to help achieve the full potential of virtualization. Through one user interface, both virtual and physical resources can be managed.

A key feature of IBM Systems Director is IBM Systems Director VMControl. VMControl represents a transformation from managing virtualization to using virtualization to better manage your IT infrastructure. VMControl simplifies the management of virtual environments across multiple virtualization technologies and hardware platforms, freeing you from “silos of virtualization” and delivering enterprise-wide visibility and control. A leading multiplatform virtualization management solution, VMControl is now available in three Editions (Express, Standard or Enterprise) to best match your virtualized environment.

VMControl Express Edition decreases infrastructure costs and improves service levels by providing complete virtual server life-cycle management for IBM server platforms. It manages virtual server resources to create, modify, delete and relocate virtual machines. It simplifies the management of virtual server environments by requiring fewer tools and a common interface across multiple platforms.

VMControl Standard Edition enables the creation and management of images to use when creating and deploying virtual workloads. It provides simplified virtualization management, which enables faster problem solving, a higher return on investment and rapid responses to changing business goals and strategies. VMControl Standard Edition deploys applications faster with virtual images and reduces deployment errors. Image sprawl is reduced by maintaining virtual images in a centralized library.

VMControl Enterprise Edition helps you to create and modify system pools, make dynamic virtual workload adjustments and move workloads within system pools, resulting in an optimized virtual environment with increased resilience to cope with planned or unplanned downtime. System pools are grouped computing resources managed as a single entity. VMControl Enterprise Edition also delivers the enabling technology required for cloud computing.

Managing energy

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™ is a unique energy management software tool that can provide a single view of the actual energy usage across the systems and facilities within your data center. It measures, monitors and manages


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the energy to help you understand and control data center energy consumption and costs. The scope of energy management can include facility providers as well, thus enabling a more complete view of energy consumption within the data center. Active Energy Manager helps you maintain service availability in your existing energy envelope, and improves energy efficiency to avoid costly data center upgrades or new construction.

Managing the network

IBM Systems Director Network Control provides integration of server, storage, and network management for virtualization environments across platforms. IBM Systems Director Network Control will discover, manage, monitor, and configure vendor-based network devices, leveraging existing IBM Systems Director functionality and integration of vendor applications. It enables a unified view to simplify network management tasks and reduce complexity and costs. Network Control also provides higher bandwidth and converged fabrics to help eliminate server, storage and network sprawl.

Integrated service management

IBM Tivoli Software, in combination with Systems Director, delivers integrated service management to help manage a dynamic infrastructure, improve service, reduce costs and manage risk. IBM integrated service management—from the industry-leading platform management provided with Systems Director to enterprise-class solutions from Tivoli—provides the visibility, control, and automation across the service life cycle to shed light on and align assets across organizational boundaries to help you deliver differentiated services and achieve business objectives.

Figure 2. IBM Systems Director, together with the high-performance IBM System x, delivers cost savings through virtualized environments.

Figure 3. IBM Systems Director supports a wide variety of platforms including IBM Power Systems servers such as the IBM Power 780.


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Building a dynamic infrastructure for a Smarter Planet™

Building a dynamic infrastructure that addresses today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities, you need to not only ensure high availability and quality of existing services, but also meet customer expectations for flexible access to innovative new services that are delivered in the shortest possible time. With IBM Systems Director, you can optimize the utilization of the multisystem hardware and systems software in your data center. IBM Systems Director offers a solution to help you reduce operational complexity, improve the efficiency of IT staff and systems, and help control costs while meeting business requirements for service delivery.

Figure 4. IBM Systems Director for Linux on System z helps to simplify and reduce IT infrastructure.

For more information

Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner or visit:

IBM Systems Director: http://ibm.com/systems/software/director/

IBM Power Systems Management: http://ibm.com/systems/power/software/management/index.html

IBM System x: http://ibm.com/systems/x/index.html


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http://ibm.com/systems/x/index.html

http://ibm.com/systems/power/software/management/index.html

http://ibm.com/systems/software/director/


IBM BladeCenter: http://ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/

IBM Systems Director for System z: http://ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/virtualization/director.html

Tivoli: http://http://bm.com/software/tivoli/


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http://http://bm.com/software/tivoli/

http://ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/virtualization/director.html

http://ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/


IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac for IBM Systems Director

Simplify data center component management for enhanced availability and reduced costs

Highlights Enables centralized systems management to help improve availability and

reduce expenses

Facilitates near-real-time monitoring and status reporting for optimum use and effective decision making

Leverages IBM expertise and best practices for well-planned, implementation of the IBM® Systems Director framework

Providing efficient and professional implementation of a superior resource administration capability

Monitoring and managing the growing complexity of data center components can be expensive and time consuming. But you can’t afford the consequences of inefficient management—including potential downtime and poorly utilized resources within your IBM System x® server environment. You need to simplify systems management without putting additional burdens on your budget and staff.

IBM Implementation Services for System x –ServicePac® for IBM Systems Director provides quick and efficient installation and configuration of near-real-time monitoring and management capabilities, and key features available through IBM Systems Director. An integrated, cross-platform management tool, Systems Director can help enhance availability and efficiency while driving savings across your organization. A central, easy-to-use overview interface can give you greater visibility into utilization of your physical and virtual resources, enabling you to better manage power usage and expenses. Systems Director enables seamless integration of IBM systems with the total infrastructure, as well as with enterprise systems management solutions, such as IBM Tivoli® software.

Helping to improve availability and reduce costs

Effective implementation of the Systems Director framework can enable you to easily manage your growing physical and virtual server environment resources and centrally monitor your IBM System x health and status. Our solution’s superior administration capability helps you improve availability and gain better returns from your IT investments. And by optimally managing your existing resources, you can save on maintenance, space and power.

Enabling improved use and effective decision making

Our solution can provide a high-level understanding of your resource use patterns to enhance decision making. You can monitor workload characteristics and get event-


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based alert reports on servers and component status, helping you to capitalize on your IT capabilities. A better understanding of your data center performance and resource utilization can also enable you to more accurately determine budgets for your growing IT environment.

Offering a well-planned implementation of the Systems Director framework

Our team of professionals leverages years of technical and cross-industry implementation expertise to provide you with rapid and well-planned installation and configuration of the Systems Director management application, common agents and other key functions. Our project managers and skilled server experts help ensure timely project execution with minimal interference with ongoing operations. With a reliable resource administration solution and effective implementation, we enable your in-house staff to focus on other core business activities, rather than investing time and effort in managing complex data center resources.

Why IBM?

IBM has extensive technical implementation expertise with System x, coupled with strong back-end support for carrying out an efficient implementation. Our comprehensive project management capabilities along with the experience gained from numerous successful engagements enables us to help you quickly install Systems Director within your System x environment.

Trademarks

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, ServicePac , BladeCenter, IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™, Power Systems, System Storage, System x, System z and Tivoli are trademarks or


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registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at http://ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

The IBM home page can be found at: http://www.ibm.com .


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http://www.ibm.com/

http://ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml