Guild Companies--IBM Offers Self-Managing Blade Server Bundle

The reason why IBM bought Canadian systems provisioning and automation software maker Think Dynamics this year was to allow it to create Wintel and Lintel servers that could help provision themselves based on policies set by business directors. And today IBM is announcing a special bundle of hardware and software that aims to create a more self-managing platform for Web infrastructure than it has offered to date.

This bundle, called the Intelligent Web Orchestrator, has the revamped ThinkControl systems management and provisioning application, which is now called Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, at its heart. The bundle is part of the Project Symphony set of Tivoli products and bundles that IBM will be rolling out this year as it tweaks the Think Dynamics programs and fits them into its on-demand strategy.

The blade bundle includes a BladeCenter Intel-based blade server equipped with a Windows 2000 operating system, plus IBM's WebSphere middleware, and, optionally, IBM's DB2 database (for dynamic Web content). To make the bundle more than just a sum of its parts sold at a slight discount, IBM has created the workflows in the Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator management tool and the IBM Director scripts for its WebSphere Web server and application server that allow a new blade in the BladeCenter chassis to be automatically provisioned from bare metal to include a Windows operating system plus WebSphere, and then to be added to the network based on policies that are set inside the Tivoli product. When IBM later offers support for Windows 2003 and Linux variants, the bundle will be more useful, since radically different workloads might be moved on and off blades within the BladeCenter as conditions dictate.

This automated provisioning stands in stark contrast to how most servers get provisioned (by which one means adding an operating system, a software stack, and making it useful on the network) today. Most companies set up servers by hand, and they don't reprovision those servers very often, if at all.

IBM has recently added capacity-on-demand capabilities to the BladeCenter chassis, whereby customers can buy the chassis with seven two-way HS20 blade servers with 2.8 GHz Xeon DP processors activated, and have another seven boards on standby (which is its maximum capacity inside a single chassis). This provisioning bundle meshes well with capacity on-demand, since customers will be able to automatically provision those extra blades as they need them.

A license for Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator costs $20,000 on a bare-bones BladeCenter machine with only one blade. The price of the Intelligent Web Orchestrator bundle varies depending on what options customers pick, but on a fully loaded BladeCenter with Windows 2000, the IBM Director systems-management programs for the BladeCenters, the Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator provisioning tool, and the WebSphere middleware cost $300,000.

Jeff Benck, vice president in charge of the blade servers in IBM's Systems Group, says that IBM is working on a similar orchestration bundle for Citrix MetaFrame environments, and says that a bundle based on grid middleware is a logical move, too, since BladeCenters running Linux are becoming popular among academic and research institutions, which like the density, network integration, and systems management features that blade servers offer. It would not be surprising to see a similar bundle for groupware and collaboration workloads based on IBM's Domino and Microsoft's Exchange Server programs, either.