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IBM will this week use the U.S. Open tennis tournament to showcase a revamped set of server provisioning middleware it acquired in May, when it bought Think Dynamics. The ThinkControl provisioning software is based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition standard, on Web services standards like Simple Object Access Protocol and Open Grid Services Architecture, and on other standards such as XML and Simple Network Management Protocol, all of which IBM champions. ThinkControl, which is now called Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, creates a pool of IT resources that can be allocated to applications dynamically based on policies set by business managers.

The main initial goal of the software, according to Sandy Carter, vice president of Tivoli marketing at IBM, is to help customers drive up the utilization of their existing servers. And a marketing and technology initiative code-named Project Symphony aims to package this new Tivoli software with other IBM products and services to help customers apply what IBM is learning to their shops.

According to Carter, IBM did several surveys with customers, and 77 percent of these customers said that over the next 12 months they would be spending money to try to maximize the utilization of their existing resources. The typical server farm is running at 10 to 20 percent utilization, and even a well-run organization has trouble getting average server utilization much above 35 to 40 percent. IBM wants to double, triple, or quadruple average processor usage rates to hit the ideal of 80 percent, said Carter. This is an ambitious goal, but, at least for the demonstration at the U.S. Open, IBM has been showing that this is possible.

The U.S. Open Web site, which will field some 22 million hits during the course of the contest, is running on a cluster of pSeries AIX servers. On another cluster of pSeries servers, IBM is running a set of high-tech protein-folding applications, which can take months to unfold just one protein. This is a very dense application. Sitting between these two clusters is a Linux-based xSeries server, running Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator. When traffic on the Web site is low, some of the protein-folding work is shuffled to the pSeries machines. If Web traffic increases, Intelligent Orchestrator can deallocate some of the processors dedicated to the protein-folding application and activate them for Web serving. The important thing in this case is that the protein-folding application keeps running. If there is one thing you don't want for such an application it is having to start over from the beginning. Using Intelligent Orchestrator, IBM has been able to keep the utilization of both clusters at 80 percent of capacity.

This setup, while interesting, is trivial compared with the challenges that most commercial data centers face. They usually do not have a lot of production jobs that can be put on hold during the course of the business day, as was done to the protein-folding application in the U.S. Open demonstration. Banks have to process transactions and do batch updates to databases and print out statements, often at the same time. But the advent of software like Intelligent Orchestrator will let them examine how they set up their servers and applications to work separately and to rethink how they might work together on a smaller number of machines that are easier and less costly to manage. This product, like those from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Opsware, to name only three, is going to resonate with data center managers. Project Symphony consists of a bunch of different packages that allow IBM to sell Intelligent Orchestrator to companies that take a do-it-yourself approach, to those who need a little help, and to those who want the most hand-holding and training.

Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator can run on either Windows or Linux servers. IBM added the Linux support, which was made possible because ThinkControl was written using open standards like SOAP, J2EE, XML, and SNMP. IBM also added support for its DB2 database and WebSphere middleware to ThinkControl; it had already supported middleware from BEA Systems and databases from Oracle. Right now, Intelligent Orchestrator can manage servers running Windows, Linux, AIX, and Solaris. Support for HP-UX servers is coming by the end of the year, and support for the z/OS mainframe is coming, too. OS/400 servers that have been equipped with Tivoli monitoring software can also be brought under control of Intelligent Orchestrator.

The software will be generally available later in September, and the base bundle of software and services will range in price from $20,000 to $50,000. Support for direct storage and NAS arrays is already in the software, and SAN support is coming in the not-too-distant future. Exactly when, Carter would not say. But she did say that IBM would be showing off the full Project Symphony roadmap in October.