Roadmaps and Get Started Offerings


Roadmaps and Get Started Offerings

Once you have a clear understanding of your current IT infrastructure situation, it's time to concentrate on specific on demand solutions available today that can move you toward an on demand operating environment. To help with this, IBM has assembled some of the on demand building blocks described in earlier chapters into a set of Get Started Offerings, which are available for immediate implementation. The Get Started Offerings are components of three distinct roadmaps: Integration, Automation, and Virtualization. Collectively, these three roadmaps embody the overall vision for on demand operating environments (Figure 4.1). By focusing on these three roadmaps and the associated Get Started Offerings, a business can build on existing investments and evolve in a modular and incremental way towards the on demand business ideal. Let's take a look at each area.

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Figure 4.1: The three on demand operating environment roadmaps— Integration, Automation, and Virtualization.

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MORE ON THE WEB
  • On demand operating environment summary

  • Operating environment Q&A

(see page x)

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Integration—Creating Flexibility

In the context of on demand, Integration is a broad term that refers to the efficient and flexible combination of resources to optimize operations across and beyond an enterprise. The idea is to bring people, processes, and information together to create a business that has the flexibility to thrive in an on demand world.

The Integration Roadmap

Figure 4.2 graphically depicts the progressive nature of integration. Starting in the lower left quadrant of this roadmap, you can see that early integration efforts focus on enabling the free flow of information between disparate application programs. This in turn enables the integration of the business processes they support (middle of the graph), which leads to a fully integrated business (upper right). A similar progression of integration happens with business information. Information integration may start with occasional database synchronization (data replication) and progress through data warehouse implementations and finally the "information federation" phase in which all information is brought together in one view, enabling better business decisions.

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Figure 4.2: The Integration Roadmap.

Finally, since people need to combine their efforts to create business value, enabling them to work together efficiently towards common business goals is vital. Here we are talking about enabling the collaboration of individuals and teams within a company and with key customers, suppliers, and business partners. Simple collaboration can be enabled by providing a common doorway (portal) to information, often through a Web site. More effective collaboration is provided through things like instant messaging, shared documents, on-line meetings, scheduling, virtual "team rooms," and other tools. The culmination of these collaborative functions is a complete on demand workplace where individuals and teams can productively meet, work, review, approve, and share needed information.

Get Started Offering—Business Integration

The IBM Business Integration offering is a good example for the integration offering category. This Get Started Offering is a series of products and methods designed to help customers progress towards the goal of end-to-end business integration. Business integration has been a goal for close to a decade, which speaks to both the importance and the difficulty of the concept. It provides the ability to integrate data, application programs, processes, and people to reduce costs and become more responsive. The result is a more competitive company that enjoys reduced business process execution costs and an enhanced ability to take advantage of new business opportunities and changing market conditions. Companies that have a high degree of business integration interact with people and groups more easily than their competitors do. This includes the ability to collaborate with supply chain partners, leverage intelligence inside the company and with external partners, and enhance customer relationship management.

The WebSphere Business Integration products allow a business to leverage past investments by integrating existing application programs, business data, and ultimately the business processes they support. Business integration requires a business process management (BPM) solution to be effective. There are several main WebSphere products to accomplish BPM. There is WebSphere Business Integration Workbench which is a set of tools that allows you to model your enterprise business processes and then efficiently test, cost, analyze, simulate, validate, and deploy those processes. There are WebSphere MQ Workflow products which support business process workflows and their interactions with people and other systems. There is WebSphere Business Integration Monitor that provides real-time information about WebSphere MQ Workflows in process. These are just a few of the WebSphere Business Integration products in use to help a business move towards the on demand model.

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MORE ON THE WEB
  • Integration Roadmap and Get Started Offerings

  • WebSphere Business Integration products

(see page x)

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See the More on the Web inset for info on other examples of Get Started Offerings in the integration category such as the IBM Collaboration Portal Offering.

Virtualization—Improving Utilization

The term "virtualization" refers to computer science techniques that enable efficient resource sharing, hide complexities, and provide data and application program independence from the physical details of a computing infrastructure. Through virtualization techniques, the resources within an IT infrastructure can be automatically consolidated and pooled to form a "virtual" single system illusion managed through a uniform interface. The result is an easily accessible computing infrastructure that provides more flexibility, simplified management, less wasted resource, and a lower TCO.

You may recall that virtualization is one of the four key attributes of an on demand operating environment. Earlier in this book we explored some virtualization techniques applied at the server and storage level (e. g., dynamic logical partitioning, workload management, dynamic processor deallocation, hot-swappable server blades, clustering, etc.) that lead to better server and storage utilization. In an overall on demand context, virtualization goes beyond the substantial server and storage capabilities we have explored so far. When these capabilities are coupled with their virtualized operating systems and other enabling software technologies, you have the foundation of the on demand operating environment infrastructure.

As with other aspects of the on demand journey, the path to a virtualization and a logical rather than physical view of resources involves taking several steps. The first steps are to consolidate and simplify your server and storage resources. This lays the groundwork for pooling resources, either for an entire infrastructure or for a subset of your environment. Once this consolidation is accomplished, there are many technologies that may then be implemented to enhance and exploit a virtualized environment, including the automatic provisioning of resources such as servers, storage, networks, applications, and identities. Grid computing and Web services technologies extend the reach of the environment, not only for high-performance computing, but also for business applications. The result is an on demand operating environment offering a broader set of servers, storage, application programs, communications links, information, and even highly specialized equipment (e.g., remotely operated electron microscopes, a deep space telescope, medical equipment, etc.), still better utilization, and the opportunity for higher performance and further reductions in TCO.

The Virtualization Roadmap

Though IBM first introduced the concept decades ago, we are still just scratching the surface of the vast potential virtualization has to offer. Figure 4.3 depicts how virtualization techniques evolve up the value chain from lower left to upper right. Virtualization must necessarily begin with the server and storage building blocks that we have explored thus far (lower left quadrant of the graph). In the middle section of the roadmap, we begin to assemble these virtualized building blocks to create virtualized networks (e.g., clusters of servers, SANs, etc.). The "common hypervisor" element shown in the graph refers to a unified system management interface or conceptually the "operating system" for a virtualized network. When we get to the upper right quadrant of the roadmap, we begin to see a closer linkage between business goals and the behavior of the underlying computing infrastructure. That is, pre-defined business policies automatically dictate in real-time the capabilities and priorities of all users and resources participating in the virtualized network, helping to maximize overall business results.

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Figure 4.3: The Virtualization Roadmap.

Get Started Offering—Entry Virtualization Server

IBM today offers many virtualized building blocks that are used to construct on demand operating environments, including the servers, storage, and software covered earlier. IBM is also beginning to deliver virtualized on demand offerings on top of these building blocks. For example, the IBM Entry Server Virtualization offering is designed to help a business find opportunities to reduce costs, complexity, and management overhead through server consolidation. This offering consists of a Get Ready component and a Get Started component. Depending on the complexity of the environment, the Get Ready component may be a two-to five- day assessment process, a System IT Rationalization Study, or an IT Optimization Study (all mentioned above).

The Get Started component of the Entry Server Virtualization Offering consists of several building blocks including IBM eServer BladeCenter, IBM Director, and IBM Tivoli SAN manager. The ideas is to migrate the workloads off of a group of underutilized Intel servers and onto a single BladeCenter server. The benefits of doing so typically include reduced systems management complexity, improved availability, better security, better scalablity, reduced maintenance, and lower software licensing costs.

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MORE ON THE WEB
  • Virtualization Roadmap and Get Started Offerings

(see page x)

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See the More on the Web inset for info on other examples of Get Started Offerings in the virtualization category, including the following:

  • IBM TotalStorage Virtualization family

  • IBM WebSphere Application Server

  • IBM Grid Offering for Analytics Acceleration: Financial Markets

Automation—Increasing Responsiveness

As with integration and virtualization, automation is not new to computer systems. For decades computer systems have continually strived to become more automatic in nature, and progress has been made over time (e.g., automatic batch jobs, automatic accounting processes, and automatic backup/recovery functions). What's new is the level of infrastructure-wide automation that is required to support the emerging on demand business environment. As a business evolves towards the on demand model, the underlying operating environment necessarily becomes more complex, which drives the need for automation in all areas of the infrastructure. Without automation, infrastructures can not remain reliable, secure, affordable, or even functional.

IBM has developed the Automation Blueprint, which will guide the development of these building blocks (Figure 4.4). The bottom layer of the blueprint depicts the on demand operating environment foundation pieces (servers, storage, operating systems, middleware, etc.) upon which automation function is built. Through virtualization techniques and open standards, a business can preserve much of their current investment in hardware and software infrastructure while evolving to higher levels of automation.

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Figure 4.4: IBM Automation Blueprint.

The next layer shows where the next level of software (e.g., Tivoli, DB2, and WebSphere products) plays a key role in the areas of availability, security, optimization, and provisioning. Above that is the Policy Based Orchestration layer, which automatically dictates the response to changing infrastructure conditions according to pre-defined business policies. For this layer, IBM is combining such products as like Tivoli, WebSphere, and DB2 with some key technology gained through the recent acquisition of Think Dynamics. The top layer of the blueprint is Business Driven Service Management, where the focus is on things like billing and metering, business process modeling, service level management, etc.

You will recall from earlier discussions that autonomic computing refers to the ability to quickly "sense and respond" to changing conditions much as our own central nervous system senses and responds to change—without our conscious involvement. Increasingly automated operating environments will be achievable through the deployment of building blocks (servers, storage, software, services, etc.) that increasingly leverage autonomic computing technologies (depicted in the blueprint as a circular arrow). That is, autonomic basic functions required to achieve the highest levels of automation.

The Automation Roadmap

IBM has produced the Automation Roadmap to illustrate the evolutionary path towards higher levels of automation (Figure 4.5). The lower left quadrant of the roadmap depicts the expenses associated when only minimal levels of automation are in place—that is, when there are some system management tools in place to help with hardware-related tasks... but little else. The result is a labor-intensive environment in which people have to "micro-manage" the computing infrastructure.

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Figure 4.5: Automation Roadmap.

As the automation level increases, things become both more logical (virtualized) and dynamic. The virtualization allows for improved utilization and simplified management of hardware and software resources—both lowering TCO. As things become more dynamic, the infrastructure is able to respond more quickly and provide higher levels of availability (e.g., preemptive problem management) and automatically shift resources as workloads fluctuate. Ultimately, we again arrive at the goal of allowing pre-defined business policies and priorities to control the automatic real-time response of an infrastructure to changing conditions.

Get Started Offering—Web Server Provisioning

IBM WebServer Provisioning is one of the Get Started Offerings in the automation category. It consists of a collection of hardware (IBM BladeCenter and FAStT900 storage) and software (Directory, Remote Deployment Manager, WebSphere Application Server, Tivoli's Storage Manager and Monitoring family, and DB2). This collection of on demand building blocks works together to provide a Web server that can dynamically balance workloads and self-optimize its resources to provide the best response time and system utilization. It leverages the BladeCenter's ability to shift workloads and hot-plug server blades to keep things going even in the event of various failure scenarios.

See the More on the Web inset for info on other examples of Get Started Offerings in the automation category including the following:

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MORE ON THE WEB
  • Automation Blueprint, Roadmap and Get Started Offerings

  • Paper: Maximizing... the on demand Operating Environment

  • Autonomic Assessment Tool

(see page x)

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  • IBM Storage Provisioning Offering

  • IBM User Provisioning Offering

  • IBM Availability Management Offering

  • Tivoli Autonomic Monitoring Engine

  • IBM Security Event Management Offering

  • IBM Optimization for zSeries Offering

  • IBM Optimization for iSeries Offering




Building an On Demand Computing Environment with IBM. How to Optimize Your Current Infrastructure for Today and Tomorrow
Building an On Demand Computing Environment with IBM: How to Optimize Your Current Infrastructure for Today and Tomorrow (MaxFacts Guidebook series)
ISBN: 193164411X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 20
Authors: Jim Hoskins

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