IBM has launched what it calls the industry’s first
systems management portfolio allowing companies to discover,
monitor and manage diverse virtual and physical computing resources
from a common portal, including IBM and non-IBM systems and
software.
The IBM Systems Director aims to allow customers to better
manage all of their virtual and physical resources in a datacentre,
working with Tivoli offerings to provide complete cross-enterprise
service management. IBM claims that its new IBM Virtualisation
Manager software will significantly reduce the number of management
tools needed to support multiple types of servers.
The Virtualisation Manager dashboard operates in a Web-based
user interface and allows businesses to manage technology resources
like they would a financial portfolio. It aims to move computing
workloads to key areas of the datacentre that will drive
productivity, identify problems in the infrastructure, grow
existing workloads and add or delete computing resources.
IBM regards its new products as the first technology of its type
to work across multiple major virtualisation platforms, including
initial support for VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen and
POWER-based virtualisation offerings. Clients can also leverage the
capabilities of VMware’s VirtualCenter by integrating it into IBM
Director to provide a single point of management.
”The cost of administering increasingly complex systems is
growing faster than the cost of new hardware, making system
management the next frontier of virtualisation,” says Rich Lechner,
vice-president, virtualisation at IBM. “As customers deploy more
virtualisation and partitioning technology from multiple vendors,
it's creating a need for more simplified management of these
diverse virtualised infrastructures.”