IBM promises cheaper data centre management

IBM has claimed that its Systems Director VMControl tool for enterprises combined with a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager can dramatically cut business costs while speeding up the deployment of virtual systems.

The company said that it can provide enterprises with a single view of IT systems and virtualisation technologies, taking in Unix/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks.

VMControl will help companies that have embraced virtualisation, but struggle to realise many of the promised benefits, according to IBM.

The system does this by "pooling" resources so that virtual and physical servers can be viewed in one place. IBM said that this would help firms to better manage systems and allocate resources, and remove the risks of over-use and under-capacity while ensuring the most economic user of power, memory and storage.

"Companies adopting the use of VMControl across their IT infrastructure will discover a significant visualisation, control and automation capability that brings operational benefits to virtual systems management, storage and networking," said Mick Walker, dynamic infrastructure principal at IBM.

"With the provision of information and control capability, IT organisations will be able to rapidly adapt their IT infrastructure to varying business demands, whilst also gaining the maximum cost-efficient utilisation of IT assets across the enterprise."

IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition supports IBM's PowerVM and z/VM, x86 virtualisation technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualisation solutions. It will be available on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December. Support for other platforms will follow in 2010.