IBM cranks up monitoring engine

Big Blue launched the Tivoli Autonomic Engine, part of its drive towards lower-cost “on-demand” computing at its DeveloperWorks Live event in New Orleans on Wednesday.

Robert Le Blanc, GM Tivoli Software, said a failure to fulfil increasing customer expectations of high service levels, among other things, meant IT services had to be consistently available on demand.

Companies could no longer afford to rely on over-provisioning to ensure business continuity and the software would give companies another effective tool to manage business processes in real-time.

“It is systems management-critical to really build out infrastructure that can react to what's going on around it. An on-demand business must respond in real time. No longer can IT systems take years or even months to adapt. Most businesses must be available 24:7,” he said.

The software automatically communicates data across different platforms and applications, and can find and begin fixing bugs and potential outages in systems before their effects show up.

Le Blanc said businesses were increasingly finding it difficult to reduce total cost of ownership yet supply the end-user experience and systems efficiency required to satisfy their customers.

“How do businesses deploy new capability quickly without having to bring in a new environment, or new hardware [for example]? We want to continue to integrate the technology across all our brands, using integrated open standards-based technology,” Le Blanc said.

Wyatt Starnes, co-founder and CEO of Tripwire, an US-based ISV, said increasing capacity and operating costs had created a reliability and security gap in many companies.

“What we are seeing ... is that [gap] has got to stay small or shrink if companies are to succeed,” he said, “The heterogeneity of Tivoli Autonomic Monitoring Engine is key [because] bringing your information over from different systems is critical.”

IBM Tivoli also announced Tivoli Configuration Manager for ATMs, which streamlines maintenance, upgrades and application monitoring, and new support for Tivoli Configuration Manager, to automate software installation across a business.

IBM NCR Corporation, a major ATM maker, have partnered to integrate NCR software with Tivoli Configuration Manager for ATMs, which allows remote software distribution and inventory management of all the software and hardware running on a self-service network.

IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console 3.9 includes a new Web console that provides remote access anywhere, and requires no endpoint installation or maintenance. IBM Tivoli Remote Control 3.8, which provides support across firewalls, will include enhanced central logging and full datastream encryption.

IBM has also added new self-managing capabilities for IBM Tivoli Storage Area Network Manager v1.2, IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager v1.2, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2.

Laws Clause: Fleur Doidge travelled to New Orleans as a guest of IBM.