“Systems management is becoming proactive and predictive”

Tivoli Software is one of the five key IBM Software Group brands. This systems management software suite helps companies manage security, storage, performance & availability, and configuration & operations. Tivoli’s general manager Robert LeBlanc explains to VAL SOUZA how Tivoli fits neatly into IBM’s on-demand strategy

In what way is Tivoli more than an automation of routine network management? How does it tie in with the autonomic computing paradigm that IBM’s been promoting?
One of the important aspects of Tivoli software is performance and availability. That’s about monitoring of servers, networks, applications and databases. We’re starting to take that to the next level—99.99 percent availability is fine, but we want to provide a holistic view of the environment so you can understand how it impacts the business. The Tivoli Business Systems Manager enables you to get an end-to-end view of the performance and availability of applications, like ERP or CRM for instance, from a business perspective. You want to continue to monitor the network and the storage and the servers and everything else, but it’s all about how you bring this together and get a business view, a holistic view of the environment so you can understand how it impacts the business.

We’re very focused on providing autonomic capabilities. The ability for systems to self-heal, self-configure and self-protect. What response time is the end-user getting? You want to monitor customer-facing applications and make sure of the best performance at all times. If you start missing the performance threshold, the policy you set could provide the application with more power or capacity or storage. We’re trying to help customers not only monitor but also manage service levels and the quality of service. Systems management is moving from reactionary to being more proactive and predictive. If you mine the data, there’s probably a problem signature there that tells you that at the current rate and pace, you’re going to fail your service level agreement at a particular point and therefore you can take action before it has an impact on the business. Autonomics is a very natural area for Tivoli. Today we have 26 products that have autonomic attributes to them, helping you monitor your environment and helping you take corrective action even before you have a problem.

If customers were to hook on to the on-demand, utility computing model where part of the infrastructure is outsourced, would it then still be possible to centrally manage the network through Tivoli?
Yes, in fact the utility model is an example of the on-demand model. On-demand is broader than utility, but utility is a good way to explain what we mean by on-demand. There are multiple Tivoli components monitoring things in there. There’s identity and access management, security, software distribution and workload management capabilities, to name just a few. Tivoli plays a key role in providing the capability you need to really manage utility-based computing. As you add more capacity you need to provision software; Tivoli Configuration Manager can actually distribute software out to the servers.

You spoke of mining of data. How does Tivoli help analyse utilisation of the network?
The cornerstone of the Tivoli offering is the data warehouse that we developed on top of DB2 technology. Reports can be generated from the information gathered, that tell you usage and utilisation you can manage and monitor all of that. We mine that data, so if you set up a policy that says ‘I don’t want the utilisation of my servers going above 70 percent on average’, you can fix that. And we’ve got predictive capability that will tell you based on trend analysis just when you could run out of capacity, so that you can plan for upgrades. In our storage resource management product we can tell storage by employee. We have a charge-back capability where storage can be billed. If by mining the routine usage data from the network you can predict what’s going to happen and take corrective action before it happens, then you are really providing a service to the business.

How does Tivoli fit in with the overall e-business on demand strategy?
First of all e-business on demand is just an evolution. E-business was all about putting your business processes out on the Web and the Internet. On-demand says not only is it important to connect, but it’s also important to have an infrastructure that supports the flexibility that you need in your business, such that you drive your IT infrastructure based on your business processes, customer and market demands, and competitive threats, rather than the other way round.

When you start to integrate your business end-to-end, you need the ability to view your business end-to-end. Tivoli helps you take a holistic view from a business perspective. For instance, with CRM, Tivoli can tell you the transaction rates and the end-user response times when a transaction is processed. Now that transaction may be going through a Web server and an application server to a backend database to obtain information and process it. So the servers and the network are being monitored, but Tivoli takes all these inputs and gives you an end-to-end view of the business process. Further, when you move into the grid and Web services, Tivoli provides capability to help you manage that. Management becomes more complex in a federated world and we’re helping customers to manage complexity without having to add lots of resources.

Are we seeing many examples of enterprises going in for on-demand and utility computing in Asia Pacific?
Yes. It’s really three models. There’s e-sourcing, which means buying services from a service provider. There’s also a notion of a utility centre within the organisation that enables one to manage service internally like a utility—providing the ability to add capacity on demand in order to change business processes on demand, based on a set of policies. So customers are very interested in the utility model because of the flexibility it provides. They may not think of it specifically as ‘utility computing’, but what they would like to have is a more predictive and adaptable service so that they can meet the needs of business. Some customers may want to have this internally deployed, while others ask IBM to take care of it. So outsourcing is a huge growth area for IBM, wherein an organisation’s entire data centre is managed by IBM. This is a big trend in some of our larger accounts.

It’s happening all over the world, including Asia. Customers want the flexibility but don’t always have the experience or the skills to execute on a utility model. So we’re using the technology to be able to provide this outsourced capability in a more cost-effective manner. We work with our IBM Global Services team internally to deploy the capabilities. The software group provides them with the technology and software that enables them to build out this utility model for the outsourced account.