Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning - Understanding IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning

84 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

Provisioning involves:

򐂰 Making available the right resources to the right processes and people. It is

configuring and dynamically allocating individual IT infrastructure elements

(identities, storage, networks or servers), using best practices.

򐂰 Allocation and configuration of servers, operating systems, middleware,

applications, and network devices acting as routers, switches, fire walls, and

load balancers (IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager).

򐂰 Deployment of appropriate software for applications and middleware across a

variety of device types (that is, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager).

򐂰 Creation of identity provisioning so users can access appropriate resources

across multiple heterogeneous systems (IBM Tivoli Identity Manager).

򐂰 Pre-built workflows to provide control and configuration of major vendors’

products, while customized workflows can implement your company’s IT

practices and procedures.

򐂰 Execution of these procedures in a consistent error-free manner.

Provisioning is the end-to-end capability to automatically deploy and dynamically

optimize resources in response to business objectives in heterogeneous

environments. Provisioning helps to respond to changing business conditions by

enabling the ability to dynamically allocate resources to the processes that most

need them, as driven by business policies. Provisioning of individual elements,

such as identities, storage, servers, applications, operating systems, and

middleware, is a critical step to being able to then orchestrate the entire

environment to respond to business needs on demand.

Provisioning is done with a number of Tivoli products today: the IBM Tivoli

Provisioning Manager, IBM Tivoli Storage Resource Manager, IBM Tivoli

Configuration Manager, and IBM Tivoli Identity Manager. Provisioning is a base

set of services you need to have to start to move your IT infrastructure to an

on demand operating environment. It is a base set of services that allows the

manipulation of the IT infrastructure using work flows. These workflows are a

collection of tasks that can be executed automatically.

3.4 IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center LaunchPad

The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center LaunchPad is a user interface which

allows storage administrators to launch IBM TotalStorage Open Software Family

products, which can help to support managing the storage volume lifecycle,

device configuration, performance, replication, storage network fabric, zoning,

topology, alerts, data backup, data availability, and data recovery, as well as

enterprise policies for managing host, application, database, and file system

data.

Chapter 3. Components 85

The LaunchPad for IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced

Provisioning is shown in Figure 3-27.

Figure 3-27 LaunchPad

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides the capability for third-party

vendors to add their own launchable application to the IBM TotalStorage

Productivity Center user interface. The vendor needs to provide a properties file

and a “launcher” program. The launcher program is an executable program that

the LaunchPad will invoke, which knows how to launch the management

application. Launching can be starting another executable or opening a Web

page. The key to the support is the properties file specification.

Attention: We created a video that shows an overview for the IBM

TotalStorage Productivity Center LaunchPad. Please follow the instructions in

Appendix A, “Additional material” on page 223 to download the video.

Note: The IBM TotalStorage LaunchPad is installed with the IBM

TotalStorage Multiple Device Manager.