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

128 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

6.1 Isolation and over-provisioning

The increased use of information, as well as the increased need of technology to

organize and take advantage of this information, has led to an increase in the

demand on data centers. As a result, data centers have encountered problems

with managing resources and providing appropriate levels of service for hosted

applications.

The user requirements of the data center are based on various factors, such as

operational responsiveness and application performance, availability, and

security. These expectations are often satisfied via isolation and/or

over-provisioning:

򐂰 Isolation means separating unrelated applications, and dedicating each

application to a certain execution environment consisting of network and

server infrastructure. The goal is to ensure that high application demand,

faults, or security breaches do not affect the performance, availability, and

security of another application.

򐂰 Over-provisioning means oversupplying server resources in order to meet

anticipated peak application demands, and prevent poor response times

when the application encounters unexpected demands.

When isolation is used, and each application is over-provisioned within each

isolated application environment, the result is a “trapped” capacity, that cannot

be used by other applications during times of high demand. The use of isolation

and over-provisioning to meet expected service levels results in a low

aggregated resource utilization and optimization.

6.2 Overview of IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator

IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator provides your organization with fully

automated just-in-time on demand provisioning. In this section we explain the

relationship between IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator and IBM Tivoli

Provisioning Manager.

IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator monitors servers, middleware, applications,

and storage under its control, senses degrading performance, and determines

what actions need to be taken. By closely monitoring resources, it can determine

where (for which application) a resource is needed and instruct the IBM Tivoli

Provisioning Manager to automatically deploy a server, provision storage to that

server, install the necessary software, and configure the network and/or SAN.

Utilizing its capacity management capabilities, IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator

can predict when resources will become available or needed and then start the

provisioning process, on demand, to help match IT resources with accelerating

or decreasing workloads.

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Orchestration enables data centers to move from just-in-case provisioning

(providing enough resources to fulfill peaks in IT infrastructure demand, which

typically results in low resource utilization) to just-in-time provisioning:

automating the infrastructure and executing configuration changes in a

repeatable manner, eliminating human execution errors.

Figure 6-1 shows a typical example of a data center running three applications, in

which one application needs additional resources to attend to user demand,

while the other two have enough or even extra resources allocated to them.

Traditional, manual provisioning practices do not make it practical to move

resources from one application to another to meet short-term peaks in demand.

Instead, we engage in what we call the just-in-case provisioning cycle.

Figure 6-1 Just-in-case provisioning

In contrast, IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator dynamically moves computing

resources to support the applications with the greater immediate impact on the

business just-in-time to meet user demand. This is shown in Figure 6-2.

Therefore, an organization can reach higher levels of automation and rapidly

respond to fluctuating business demands on the IT infrastructure, in line with the

overall business goals of the organization.

130 Exploring Storage Management Efficiencies and Provisioning

IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator automates the traditional, manual provisioning

process, performance measurement, capacity planning, and infrastructure

deployment. IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator operates in a closed loop that

performs automatic resource requirements prediction, based on predefined

service level objectives and agreements, and automates infrastructure

deployment. This just-in-time cycle ensures that each application has the

resource it needs, when it needs it, without static over-provisioning.

Figure 6-2 Orchestrated provisioning

While any application can be allocated to any server at any time, a server could

be built specifically for an application when it needs it and is subsequently

removed and re-initialized when it is no longer needed by the application.

At the foundation of this just-in-time provision cycle is a new way of viewing the

IT infrastructure: Rather than traditional single-purpose servers dedicated to one

application, IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator logically aggregates the computing

resource it manages into pools available to all applications in the data center

while maintaining a secure environment for each.

The paradigm shift in data center operation introduced by IBM Tivoli Intelligent

Orchestrator changes the way the use of available IT resources are managed

and orchestrated on a daily basis, and helps transition the mindset of the entire