Goals

It used to be that each new workload demanded a new server. But with the number of applications in your portfolio growing every day, the proliferation of servers may be out of control. You need to consolidate and optimize your IT resources. And you need it all to work with a range of technologies. With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers, storage, desktop, and network devices to reduce complexity and make IT management simpler. You can also reduce electricity used to power and cool these systems and save on floor space in your data center.

The Advantages

IBM offers a range of virtualization solutions for servers and storage – along with services to support planning, implementation and ongoing operations. With support for a range of hypervisors and virtualization technologies, these offerings can offer your business a number of advantages.

Support ongoing cost savings

• Enable more efficient capital expenditure with platforms that are designed to host among the highest numbers of virtual machines in the industry.
• Avoid vendor lock-in by using hypervisor neutral solutions.
• Lower power, cooling and floor space requirements with advanced green technologies and management software.

Improve service delivery

• Enable rapid deployment of new virtual systems and new workloads with assessment, design, and implementation services.
• Choose from the widest range of servers and storage portfolios in the industry tuned to virtualization with features such as extended memory, active memory failover, advanced RAS and others, thereby optimizing service levels.
• Leverage advanced application and data migration tools to help save time and minimize operational disruption.

Increase business agility

• Reduce infrastructure complexity with highly dense virtual machines coupled with leading RAS features to free up IT to respond more quickly to business needs.
• Facilitate easier integration of heterogeneous environments for an ideal mix of technologies to address your service objectives.
• Leverage a broad ecosystem of virtualization options designed to meet current and emerging challenges.

Goals

Consolidation with virtualization can reduce complexity by reducing the number of physical devices. But as the number of virtual servers and storage systems increases, other types of “sprawl” can be created. Your IT staff may find themselves occupied with different IT problems – instead of solving business issues. You need all of your provisioning, management and diagnostic tools available on a single pane of glass for simplified systems management and monitoring.

The Advantages

IBM offers innovative software solutions designed to help you simplify and unify management across your virtualized infrastructure.

Support ongoing cost savings

• Utilize capacity and energy management to enable further consolidation and reduce data center energy costs.
• Enable common integrated management tools across the infrastructure, regardless of domain or platform.
• Increase IT staff productivity.

Improve service delivery

• Accelerate identification and remediation of issues and bottlenecks.
• Map dependencies in real time across components to proactively identify potential issues.
• Automate routine administrative tasks to improve response time and reduce user error.

Increase business agility

• Accelerate planning and implementation with reference architectures and decision support frameworks.
• Leverage open standards and reuse standardized design elements to create a more modular architecture.
• Proactively plan for future capacity and energy needs of the business.

Goals

As your marketplace and the world change, your business needs to adapt with them. Which means your IT systems need to be flexible. With a virtualized infrastructure, you have the ability to assign resources to your highest priority business needs. But how do you make the systems even more responsive? With automation. With automated processes based on best practices and business rules, you can reduce manual errors as your IT systems automatically respond to changing business conditions.

The Advantages

IIBM offers solutions designed to automate your virtualized infrastructure to meet regulatory demands and market changes.

Support ongoing cost savings

• Provision across silos from bare metal to OS, to applications and storage and network to reduce time to market for new services from days to minutes.
• Reduce human errors using automated processes.
• Implement policy-based infrastructure to improve compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.

Improve service delivery

• Support higher service levels with an infrastructure that is more self-aware and self-healing.
• Better manage demand spikes and differentiate genuine demand from security attacks on the infrastructure.
• Ensure business priority alignment with IT priorities, automatically provisioning and reassigning resources as needed by the business.

Increase business agility

• Support business-based decision making with a more versatile IT options.
• Reduce the risk and cost for business strategy implementation.
• Ensure alignment of infrastructure services to business objectives.

Goals

You need business priorities to drive your IT infrastructure (not the other way around.) You need your users to be able to self-provision IT resources as appropriate. Delivery optimization solutions put business users and processes in control to dynamically drive the underlying IT infrastructure. This can help assure that resources are delivered in the most timely and efficient manner.

The Advantages

IBM offers delivery optimization solutions that can support self-provisioning, on demand, cloud-based "virtual enterprises" that are entirely unconstrained by physical barriers or location and more.

Support ongoing cost savings

• Automatically reserve and reclaim computing power to virtually eliminate underutilization.
• Support standardization with business-ready cloud offerings for significant gains in productivity and rapid return on investment.
• Gain awareness of usage-based costs to highlight efficiency opportunities and facilitate granular chargeback.

Improve service delivery

• Provide self service capabilities for provisioning application stacks as services.
• Ensure that resources are directed to the workloads that matter most to business clients.
• Support elastic scaling to avoid disruptive capacity shortfalls.

Increase business agility

• Facilitate rapid provisioning of new services or resources and the scaling of established services to dramatically increase business agility.
• Support creativity by almost entirely decoupling business decisions from infrastructure constraints.
• Preserve business capital by exploiting pay-as-you-go, self-service access to virtualized resources virtually anywhere and anytime, whether internal or external to the organization.