Seeking a way to provide customers with more hands-on opportunities to
test
its management software, IBM opened the doors
to a
new on-demand technology center Monday.
The Tivoli Orchestration and Provisioning Technology Center, in IBM’s Washington System building in Gaithersburg, Md., helps clients configure and provision applications
based
on pre-set business rules in real-time.
Using Tivoli products like Intelligent Orchestrator, Monitoring,
Enterprise
Console, Configuration Manager and TotalStorage Virtualization, IBM
customers can practice how to maximize server utilization by
provisioning
IBM eServers among pools of computing resources.
Automatically provisioning servers and other tasks in a data center are important at a time when IT administrators are looking to use software for tasks normally ceded to human engineers. The idea, according to Brian
Sanchez, director of advanced technical support for the IBM Americas
unit,
is for users to get an idea how the technology will respond on their own
networks.
Several Fortune 500 clients use Tivoli management software, which
competes
with suites from Computer Associates, HP and BMC. IBM leads the market for enterprise management software, a niche Gartner said grew to $5.6 billion in 2003.
With hands-on labs, IBM believes customers will more quickly learn the
joys
of on-demand computing. IBM has set up four other centers geared toward
on-demand computing, including one in Makuhari, Japan; Montpellier,
France; Poughkeepsie, New York and San Jose, California. But those centers are
laser-focused on grid and autonomic computing.
The center in Gaithersburg, where IBM engineers have long tested
benchmarks
for its mainframes, is the first one dedicated to the company’s Tivoli
line
of management software.
“This gives the customers different ways to come in and see what
on-demand
might do for them centered on Tivoli, rather than spending a lot of
money
and finding out later how things work,” [in their data center] told
internetnews.com.
Concurrently, users are expected to see the benefits of autonomic computing
software on IBM eServers. A cornerstone of IBM’s e-business on-demand
computing strategy, autonomic technologies self-diagnose and cure
glitches
in a network before they have the chance to bring the system down.
Remote customers who cannot travel to Gaithersburg may visit any of
IBM’s 22
“exploration centers” in North America to access live technology demos
from
the DC provisioning lab via Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator over the
IBM
intranet.
