IBM Announces New Software For Managing Data Centers

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE:IBM) today introduced ground-breaking new software for managing data centers. The new technology has the potential to dramatically cut the cost of operations while speeding the deployment of new applications from weeks to minutes.

The introduction of IBM's new VMControl product for enterprises, combined with IBM Tivoli software, gives businesses for the first time a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. It spans UNIX/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks.

VMControl helps companies that have turned to virtualization - the creation of multiple virtual servers or storage on a single physical system - to reduce infrastructure costs, but have encountered new struggles as they try to manage enterprises made up of disparate platforms, each with their own virtualization technology.

VMControl allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach - known as system pooling - expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory and storage.

Centralizing control of virtualized environments brings new intelligence to data center operations. Companies can manage their vast pools of information and processing resources and parcel them out to applications when and where they're needed. This breakthrough capability not only increases the overall capacity utilization of the IT infrastructure to lower capital, operational and energy costs, and improves application availability, but gives IT managers the flexibility to adapt to new demands being prompted by the surge of data from internet-connected devices.VMControl will also accelerate the deployment of new IT delivery models, like cloud computing, which allows information and processing resources to be tapped from afar.

"IBM has provided Winn-Dixie with many innovative solutions to help us increase productivity, maximize our resources and save money for more than 15 years," said Charlie Weston, Group Vice President, Information Technology for the Jacksonville, Fla.-based grocer. "We are extremely confident that the launch of the VMControl product will be equally as successful for IBM's customers."

The new product, together with IBM Tivoli software, helps companies address and improve service and reduce cost and risk. IBM today announced a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices.

Whether businesses are moving to the cloud or looking to deliver IT within the data center as cloud services, the sheer scale and velocity of data growth as well as the now-permanent reality of having to do more with less make VMControl essential for data centers. The combination of VMControl and Tivoli offers several benefits, such as:

Faster response to business needs: A reduction in the skills, tools and tasks required to deploy new workloads. With VMControl, companies can offer rapid deployments of new workloads (from weeks to minutes) while maintaining control over IT resources. Businesses can adapt to changing business needs and support new and diverse types of workloads in accordance with service-level agreements.More efficient use of resources: To configure, operate and monitor physical and virtualized resources across multiple IBM hardware platforms would otherwise require as many as dozens of different management techniques. Buying, building and maintaining disparate management tools take up significant portions of IT budgets. VMControl reduces the management tools to one, cutting costs of operations.

Awareness, consistency and predictability of operations: Business can monitor, maintain and adjust the service levels required by each computing workload handled by the pool of IT resources. It also can help predict and react to system problems. By moving workloads away from failing systems, VMControl can ensure workloads maintain application availability and avoid unplanned down time.

Enabling Smarter Systems: VMControl's ability to dynamically move workloads and make adjustments allow IBM systems to be more effectively utilized, use less power and cooling and provide a much more resilient infrastructure.

The new product -- IBM Systems Director VMControl(TM) Enterprise Edition -- supports IBM's PowerVM and z/VM as well as x86 virtualization technologies such as VMWare, Hyper-V and open x86 virtualization solutions. VMControl Enterprise Edition will be available on IBM Power Systems running AIX in December, 2009. Additional support for other platforms is planned for next year as part of a dynamic infrastructure.