IBM Director 5.2 Brings Updates for i5/OS, Other Platforms

Published: November 28, 2006

by Alex Woodie

IBM recently announced an update to IBM Director, a series of entry-level systems management tools for monitoring and controlling a range of IBM and non-IBM server platforms, including i5/OS, z/OS, Windows, Linux, and Unix. With IBM Director version 5.2, IBM is introducing several i5/OS-related features, such as support for iSCSI BladeCenter attachments and cross-partition data collection services, as well as a number of enhancements for other platforms.

While IBM's Tivoli unit sells enterprise-strength systems management software that competes with the likes of BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and (increasingly) Microsoft with its MOM and SMS suite of tools, the IBM Software Group out of Raleigh, North Carolina, also offers a suite of software designed to fill the gap for an affordable, easy-to-use systems management tool.

There are several members of the IBM Director family, including IBM Director for i5/OS, IBM Director for AIX 5L and Linux on POWER, IBM Director for Linux on System z, and IBM Director on x86. In each case, the IBM Director software delivers a Java-based management console where administrators can perform several tasks, including: monitoring the consumption of processor, memory, and disk resources; tracking hardware inventory and software configurations; receiving and correlating events from different systems; and taking corrective actions from remote location.

A range of platform-specific agents are used to gather performance data, while a series of extensions provide additional functionality. IBM also offers extensions for capacity planning, availability tracking, remote deployment, virtualization monitoring (via IBM Virtualization Manager), and electricity consumption (via PowerExecutive). However, the majority of the extensions only support Windows and Linux environments, which reflects IBM Director's heritage as a blade server monitoring tool.

IBM Director 5.2 brings many enhancements, including new features that are common to all versions of the software and some platform-specific enhancements. All versions gain improvements to the product's installation and update routines. The X86 version of the tool gains better security through support for LDAP authentication, better tracking and management of software updates and firmware, and support for the latest IBM hardware.

IBM Director for i5/OS gains several new features peculiar to the System i platform, including an installation routine that's been optimized for i5/OS, comprehensive support for iSCSI BladeCenter servers attached to System i machines, and the capability to gather system data from Linux and AIX logical partitions (LPARs) running on System i machines, via agents installed in those LPARs.

IBM's planned availability date for IBM Director for i5/OS 5.2 is January 12, 2007, which is about the same time that IBM Director products on other platforms ship. For more information on IBM Director for i5/OS 5.2, see IBM Software Announcement 206-287. For more info on the IBM Director family, see www-03.ibm.com/systems/management/director.