IBM to Beef Up Unix Provisioning Software

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM this week gave a sneak preview of a tweaked release of its Tivoli Provisioning Manager, the heart of the server provisioning software that IBM acquired when it bought Think Dynamics last year. While the original software created by Think Dynamics was predominantly made to control the provisioning of the HP-UX Unix environment, IBM will in June launch Provisioning Manager 2.1, which will run on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows, servers and will be able to control the provisioning of bare metal servers and logical partitions on Unix, Linux, Windows, and OS/400 servers.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager is used to set up the operating system and application stacks on servers and to keep them patched as software is updated. The adjunct Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator works with the provisioning software through a policy-based engine that controls how servers, storage, and network capacity are provisioned, based on business rules (such as making sure Web site and database servers have enough processors to yield a decent response time). Sandy Carter, vice president of marketing for the Tivoli unit, says that Provisioning Manager 2.1 will be available in June and IBM could have new pricing at that time. The current release costs $1,100 per server processor and $50 per network node. Carter says that a typical customer spends around $20,000 for a basic setup.

In addition to the new release, IBM is offering a bundled configuration on its xSeries 335 servers that has "one-button provisioning." The provisioning software has been preconfigured to implement a Windows or Linux operating system on the machine, and a WebSphere stack and a Tivoli monitoring agent. It also preconfigures the network resources and can do the whole shebang automatically within an hour. IBM is offering another software bundle on iSeries or pSeries server iron that allows for the automatic provisioning of application servers for the SAP ERP suite running in conjunction with its DB2 database. IBM will also debut workflows that hook into the Provisioning Manager engine that can provision HP-UX servers and machines running Microsoft's Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory, as well as IBM's own DB2 database and WebSphere middleware and VMware virtual partitions on X86 iron and application stacks from Siebel Systems, SAP, and Citrix. Presumably, one-button provisioning for IBM's own AIX environment and Sun Microsystems' Solaris is in the works, as are workflows for automatically provisioning AIX and Solaris servers.

IBM also announced last week that Provisioning Manager 2.1 will be able to hook into the Tivoli SAN manager to better automate storage provisioning. The company also said that because it has done storage API exchanges with Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi, the Provisioning Manager/SAN Manager combo can now reach into high-end arrays from those companies and do automated storage provisioning. While the software helps a bit with EMC arrays, IBM and EMC have not swapped APIs and therefore the functionality is more limited. Customers who have EMC's provisioning software can apparently tweak it to work with Provisioning Manager 2.1.