White PaperIBM Systems and Technology

Unleash the hidden power of ITAchieving business results through comprehensive systems management

2 Achieving business results through comprehensive systems management

Unlock the full power of IT through simplified, efficient and comprehensive management of the technology environment. Then put it to work for the business.

Systems and Technology 3

Contents

4 Virtualization is only the beginning

5 The IBM approach: Top-to-bottom and end-to-end

6 Addressing key business imperatives

7 Start off on the right foot with IBM systems management

7 Find out more

To compete in today’s sophisticated marketplace, businesses are viewing the strategic role of IT in a new light. CFOs are looking for ways to intelligently reduce costs–avoid new costs, reduce existing ones and balance expenditures against the value they create. CIOs are seeking to create dynamic, real-time access to innovative new services, achieve dramatic gains in productivity and manage the new risks of an increasingly connected and collaborative new world. Both are turning to IT to provide answers.

Driven by these new imperatives, IT’s traditional function of providing behind-the-scenes support for existing business processes is evolving rapidly. It is emerging from its support role and becoming the centerpiece of innovation and real-time business agility that drives profit and growth. The focus is less on individual, single-purpose platforms and more on a holistic view of how the IT environment can be used to improve service, bring new offerings to market faster and respond to changing business conditions more quickly. What’s needed to reach these goals is more than advanced technology; it’s a way to manage that technology in new ways that are more efficient, more flexible, less expensive and more productive.

One innovative way that technology can contribute to the bottom line is by enabling the automation of business processes. For example, self-service portals can allow customers to manage their own accounts, thereby reducing the cost of customer service. Or, a business can improve internal efficiency by making new services available in hours instead of days or weeks – effectively putting control of computing resources into the hands of line-of-business users instead of making them submit requests to IT managers.

The possibilities are many; the common thread is an IT environment that closely couples technology with automa- tion and tightly integrated business processes across the enterprise. IBM calls this Integrated Service Management –enabling service innovation by providing Visibility. Control. Automation.TM across smarter business infrastructures and the end-to-end service chain. Integrated Service Management brings together flexible, closely managed IT, highly automated workload management and process integration to transform the way technology is employed to serve business needs. It is a game-changing concept because it allows business needs rather than technology concerns to drive IT service delivery. That’s important because it takes traditional systems-first thinking that puts IT constraints ahead of business goals and turns it on its head.

An important technology transformation that makes Integrated Service Management possible is systems management. This is a key part of the IBM vision, in which the entire infrastructure – regardless of manufacturer or device type – becomes part of a unified, integrated whole that is visible and closely controlled from end to end. With it, businesses can gain the competitive advantage they seek by improving service, while reducing cost and managing risk.

4 Achieving business results through comprehensive systems management

When combined with adaptive, virtualized technology resources that can be readily allocated and repurposed according to need, systems management can create unprece-dented levels of business agility, as shown in Figure 1.

Virtualization is only the beginningDeploying technology cannot, by itself, create the capabilities needed to achieve a fully controlled, transparent infrastruc-ture. Many businesses have already invested in virtualization technology and are seeing major cost savings; but with systems management that enables the business to utilize those assets more effectively, their true potential for business value creation can be unleashed.

Virtualization can drive major savings

The potential to reduce infrastructure costs through virtualiza-tion is dramatic. Third-party data shows that consolidating 125 mixed-vendor x86 servers onto 19 IBM System x® servers can yield direct savings – server costs, power and facilities, and server software – of more than US$2.6 million dollars. When the savings in systems management labor costs are considered, the savings grow to almost US$4 million – a total cost reduction of more than 60 percent.1

IBM systems management plays a major role in making IT more efficient, responsive and less costly by enabling greater transparency and control for administrators. Beyond this, by changing the way IT is employed by the business, it forms the backbone of Integrated Service Management – and that is the key to the competitiveness that company leadership seeks. Virtualization is just the first step along that path.

ConsolidateResources

ManageWorkloads

AutomateProcesses

OptimizeDelivery

Storage Network

Server

Improvedefficiency and utilization of IT resources

Improved IT staff productivity with integrated systems management dashboard

Consistent and repeatable processes based on best practices, business priorities and service level agreements

Self provisioned by users based on business imperatives, unconstrained by physical barriers or locations

Agility

Figure 1: To move beyond resource consolidation and achieve the optimized service delivery that yields business agility– and therefore competitive advantage – sophisticated systems management is needed.

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The implications of Integrated Service Management

Integrated Service Management is firmly rooted in advanced, effective systems management that provides visibility, automation and control of the IT environment. This example illustrates how Integrated Service Management can leverage virtualized infrastructure assets and automated processes to increase business agility while reducing cost and risk.

Business needA consumer products company launches an ambitious, but risky, promotional campaign that incorporates real-time social networking, interactive websites and viral video. A rapid and significant increase in network traffic is expected and must be accommodated at minimum cost, without reducing service levels.

Traditional responseBusiness managers create projections of the required load and submit requests to IT six months in advance to allow time for procurement, installation, testing and configuration. Staff resources are diverted from other tasks, excess capacity is deployed and there is still a risk that it won’t be sufficient.

With virtualized infrastructureBusiness managers request resource reallocation from IT managers two months in advance. Manual provisioning, configuration and testing are accomplished, with ongoing monitoring to deal with unanticipated demand. Even with virtu-alization, staff resources are tied up and response is slow.

With Integrated Service Management The capacity is automatically provisioned using virtualized server, storage and network resources controlled by business processes that are accessible to line-of-business users. Changes in load are handled autonomously and transparently without intervention by IT staff. The promotion becomes part of the normal workflow.

The IBM approach: Top-to-bottom and end-to-endMost IT environments are marked by a collection of disparate systems, managed by dedicated tools. This makes management complicated, time-consuming and inefficient. IBM overcomes this challenge by combining platform simplification, management and integration with complete visibility, control and automation of the extended infrastructure and associated processes.

The IBM approach to systems management is based on an understanding of the inherent diversity of data centers. It stands apart because it allows the full management of the environment from end to end. Through a combination of IBM Systems Director and IBM Tivoli,® it is possible to manage everything in the data center – servers, storage and network devices from any vendor, from x86 to mainframes and from individual components to large-scale, virtualized infrastructure assets. That breadth and depth of coverage is essential, because partial, disconnected solutions cannot deliver the levels of service improvement, cost reduction and risk containment required by the business.

Systems Director provides in-depth management of IBM hardware, while Tivoli “manager of managers” tools handle IT resources across the entire multivendor infrastructure and closely integrate them with business processes. This two-pronged approach is what makes IBM systems management so effective, because it enables a level of seam- less, comprehensive oversight and control that cannot be duplicated using traditional methods.

6 Achieving business results through comprehensive systems management

Addressing key business imperativesIBM systems management is a continuum – a set of building blocks that form the foundation for optimized service delivery and Integrated Service Management. Along the way, it targets the most important challenges facing business managers today.

For the business to improve market share, boost customer retention and satisfaction, and gain and maintain a competitive edge, it must continuously work to improve both the quality and availability of service. Isolated systems, complex management processes and tools, a lack of visibility into the infrastructure and reliance on manual intervention all stand in the way of keeping the infrastructure up and running.

IBM Systems Director addresses these issues by streamlining infrastructure administration through the simplification and consolidation of management functions. It offers centralized discovery and control from a “single pane of glass” that gives administrators the insight and ability to manage the infra- structure far more effectively and efficiently than is possible using traditional methods. Systems Director can dramatically increase IT administrator productivity by reducing or eliminating the need for multiple, disconnected management tools and manual processes. Rather than manage servers, storage and networks in isolation, all can be viewed and managed together, and many tasks that once occupied valuable staff time – such as provisioning a new server – can be accomp- lished much more quickly and simply, with fewer personnel.

Systems management can also help to control costs by allowing the business to use its infrastructure assets more efficiently. For example, it can reduce the number of servers needed to meet demands by enabling automated workload management that reallocates resources autonomously according to need. Or, by leveraging detailed historical data, energy usage trends can be identified and used to actively control consumption, lowering the performance of processors – and the cooling they require – during periods of low load.

Risk management is also a key concern. By providing real-time visibility into the state of the infrastructure, Systems Director can help administrators understand and target vulnerabilities more quickly and effectively. Accurate historical data helps managers analyze trends and take preventive action before issues develop, while also providing the information needed to help ensure compliance.

Leveraging advanced features built into IBM hardware also enables proactive management – heading problems off even before they occur and maximizing service levels. Managers can be automatically notified by smartphone of potential hardware problems, log on remotely and take corrective measures to keep the systems running smoothly. The problem is avoided and users don’t even need to know it existed. In an era where downtime is simply not an option, that can be a major advantage.

• Integrated control via IBM System Software including IBM Systems Director

IBM Infrastructure

Third-partyinfrastructure

• Servers/storage/ network/power cooling

• Vendor-agnostic

IBM Tivoli:®

Manager of managers

Figure 2: The IBM approach to systems management is both inclusive and comprehensive. It provides extensive control of IBM IT assets through IBM System Software offerings such as Systems Director, while overall control of the entire infrastructure is handled by Tivoli. In this way, businesses realize the best of both worlds – management that covers diverse infrastructures, combined with control all the way down to the component level.

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Addressing key business imperatives

IBM systems management can transform business operations with dramatic results while laying the groundwork for greater competitiveness through Integrated Service Management:

Service improvementIBM and Nokia delivered a smarter promotion engine that helped Globe Telecom streamline its business operations, generate new revenue and increase promotional effectiveness by 600 percent. The time and cost of developing new promo-tions has been reduced by 95 percent, giving their marketing department the means to be more proactive and effective.2

Cost reductionGetronics’ new utility hosting service helps staff rapidly switch cloud environments on and off, and proactively increase capacity as needed. Built on a dynamic infrastructure that employs IBM Integrated Service Management solutions for provisioning and storage management, it has enabled an 80 percent reduction in management costs per server, per year and has reduced time-to-market for new services from four weeks to just a few hours.3

Risk managementINTTRA implemented a robust storage solution with a “single pane of glass” interface that manages all storage operations regardless of data type. The unified console eliminates layers of management tools, which simplifies admin-istration and greatly reduces the risk of management error. In addition, together with SAN volume controllers at the com-pany’s primary and backup locations, the solution increases IT efficiency– reducing the data center footprint by 50 percent and energy costs by 30 percent.4

What makes IBM systems management so compelling is its comprehensiveness—the combination of information-based insight and the tools to put it to use. With IBM Systems Director and Tivoli, managers can see what’s happening across the entire IT environment, all in one place and in real time, and combine it with historical data to develop a full understanding of every aspect of the data center. This knowledge can be leveraged using IBM systems management tools to fully optimize the infrastructure – head off problems before they occur, maximize utilization, improve performance,

reduce the cost of power and cooling, allocate resources to handle sudden spikes in demand – anything the business requires of its IT department. That’s the behind-the-scenes key to making the business more competitive.

Start off on the right foot with IBM systems managementToday’s environment is a rich source of opportunity, but only for those able to take advantage of it. Driving efficiency, which has been an overarching theme for businesses challenged by rising costs, can only go so far in creating competitiveness. The world has changed, and so have the expectations of the marketplace.

To achieve the agility, growth, maximum profitability and ROI that the business needs, managers must deliver new and better services – while managing cost, risk and complexity. The same solution can address all of these imperatives at once. That solution is comprehensive IBM systems management. It is the key enabler that makes it all possible by going beyond traditional, isolated systems management – spanning the infrastructure to enable service innovation and optimization for the whole enterprise.

For decades, IBM has been helping businesses around the world get the most from their technology investments and that experience has yielded unparalleled business transformation and industry expertise. That’s what sets the IBM portfolio apart: The perspective and insight to deliver solutions that drive results by addressing the real-world challenges faced by businesses today.

Find out moreLet IBM show you how to leverage systems management to drive business success on a smarter planet. To learn more about how the comprehensive portfolio of IBM systems management and infrastructure solutions combine to unlock the true business value of IT, contact your IBM representative today.

Visit us at: ibm.com/systems/softwareibm.com/tivoli

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010

IBM Corporation 1 New Orchard Road Armonk, NY 10504 U.S.A.

Produced in the United States of America December 2010 All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, BladeCenter, Smarter Planet, System x and Tivoli are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

1Results based on a June 2010 sample run using the IBM Server Consolidation TCO Calculator for System x, which uses blinded, third-party data, methodologies and models provided by Alinean to ensure neutrality.

2IBM case study: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/JSTS-7Z7K7B

3IBM case study: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/LWIS-7ZXU9J

4IBM case study: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/DLAS-7UTLFQ

About the authors

Al BrodieIBM Senior Marketing Manager, Systems Management

Noah KutllerIBM Marketing Manager, Integrated Service Management