Any corporation can greatly increase its responsiveness to both customers and employees by utilizing the autonomic capabilities of self-configuring systems. With this facility in place, systems can dynamically adjust and configure themselves to adapt to a changing environment. This can be achieved with the minimum of human intervention. The deployment of changes can take place rapidly with no disruption of service to customers. The periodic swings in business cycles are a prime example. Take the retail sector during holiday seasons. Peaks are experienced at different times at the end of the year. The self-configuring infrastructure can be automatically adjusted to reassign servers to cope with the loads. It seeks out resources that are available and underutilized and assigns them accordingly.
Tivoli software management tools are available to provision a wide range of resources such as systems, applications, and users, and access privileges as well as physical and logical storage. Monitoring and event correlation tools can determine when the changes are needed and initiate the actions. These changes can be implemented rapidlyin minutes rather than days or weeks
The software tools available in Tivoli for self-configuration include:
Tivoli Configuration Manager
The Configuration Manager automatically configures the IT environment and provides a scanning engine and state engine that can sense when software on a machine is not synchronized with the reference model. It can automatically create a customized deployment plan for each machine in a cluster and execute the sequence of installation in the proper order.
Tivoli Identity Manager
The Identity Manager automates the user life cycle with the HR and native repositories. It uses automated role-based provisioning for account preparation and creation. The provisioning system communicates directly with access-control systems to help establish the accounts, providing user information and passwords as well as defining account entitlements
Tivoli Storage Manager
The Storage Manager provides self-configuring tasks to automatically identify and load the drivers for the storage devices connected to the server. Configuration and policy information can be defined once to the storage manager and then populated to other servers automatically. Policy definition and other automated recovery, and logging and administrator defined thresholds are available.
Figure 15.2 illustrates these tools in the Tivoli environment for self-configuration.
Figure 15.2. The self-configuring software tools in the Tivoli environment.
The self-configuring aspects of Tivoli can boost productivity and reduce the costs of software configuration. The management of software is a complex and costly task that requires careful automation.