I've been impressed by the speed of provisioning a set of virtual machines in just a few tens of seconds using IBM Smart Cloud Provisioning. In most cases you can get a running virtual machine in less than one minute. The Smart Cloud Provisioning technology has been devised and particularly optimized for managing the following cloud infrastructure scenarios: Infrastructure composed of homogenous resources High level of standardization with a relative small set of master images used to provision many instances from the same image... [More]

Tags:  deployment rapid cloud isaac smartcloud image

IBM® Tivoli® Service Automation Manager (TSAM) 7.2.2 introduces the concept of extension, a set of TSAM software components that can implement a new IT service automation solution (known as a service definition) or add capabilities to existing service definitions. This article ( Deploy a J2EE app with TSAM extensions ) defines a scenario in which the desired result is to securely deploy a three-tiered enterprise application (a J2EE app) to the cloud. It demonstrates how to set up and provision extensions in TSAM as the first step to... [More]

Tags:  cloud extensions firewall tsam load_balancer

Framework Manager, a Windows only desktop client is a tool used to customize/extend/create data models. If the user wants to add new or 3rd party data to Tivoli data, he can use the data modeling tool to enhance/create data models that can be used for reporting. However, if the user wants to if the user wants to create reports with the attribute groups supported by the installed agent only, he will not need to use this tool. Installing Framework Manager: Framework Manager (FM) ships with Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) and the setup... [More]

Tags:  tivoli-monitoring cognos

With December's release of IBM SmartCloud Monitoring, Tivoli's venerable IBM Tivoli Monitoring product family, proven in data centers at the world's largest corporations, begins to adopt a "Cloud" posture.  Sure, "Cloud" is a term bereft of a clear operational definition that we can apply at any given moment, and customers, analysts and vendors tend to bandy it about pretty freely these days.  However, if we don't get too hung up what Cloud is or isn't, we can probably agree that it represents a migration from our... [More]

Tags:  cloud virtualization virtual-infrastructure cloud-monitoring

I'm a big fan of standardization. I'm a big fan of using non-persistent images as well. They just make my life so much easier. The only issue I see with them is the need anyway to provide to the end user some configuration and customization possibilities. It could be something trivial like having your own screen saver, or a special keyboard and language configuration or it could be something like connecting the softwares inside the image to some specific devices, disks or additional, external software. I even do not want to think about having a... [More]

Tags:  cloud isaac customization image smartcloud

Pay as you go is one of the characteristics of cloud computing service.  To provide such a service we need to track the usage data for each cloud offering. For example, in an IaaS cloud platform, the usage data is normally the CPU, Memory, Disk, Network.  For a SaaS cloud offering like Maximo as a Service (MaaS),  the usage data required to charge the cloud offering consumer may be the business usage data, such as: how many assets are managed in the cloud for how many days, how many service requests or work orders are processed Tivoli... [More]

Tags:  chargeback cloud_cost_management maximo tuam maas

Modern Cloud infrastructures are built leveraging thousands of highly distributed servers, used to provide services directly to customers over the Internet. The service provider has two extremely important objectives, which, unfortunately, are to some degree contrasting: a) ensure continuous availability of the Cloud service, and b) contain the cost of the infrastructure and administration (CAPEX and OPEX). There are several factors that have an impact on the availability of services, mostly related to infrastructure failures. Failures are not... [More]

Tags:  mttr mttf p2p recovery-oriented-computi... provisioning roc smartcloud availability virtualization

  IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Environments V7.1 is now available.   At a glance: IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring for Virtual Environments V7.1 extends the benefits of end-to-end performance monitoring in a virtualized environment by providing additional hypervisor support and new capacity planning reports.  Features include: • New Web 2.0 dashboard • New Cisco UCS monitoring agent • New Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp performance and availability monitoring • New capacity analytics and workload placement guidance for VMware IBM Tivoli Monitoring for... [More]

Tags:  monitoring ucs netapp cisco vmware xenserver itm dashboard xendesktop