IBM Helps Companies Monitor Data Center ’Health’ with New Cloud Service

New monthly subscription service helps prevent I.T. down-time, predict bottlenecks and gain control of data center

ARMONK, N.Y. - IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the availability of online software - as a monthly subscription service - to help monitor, predict and prevent I.T. outages.

Today even the smallest I.T. departments are demanding capabilities to identify where bottlenecks might occur, prevent them from occurring and automate data center processes. I.T. staff need a central point of control to oversee the piecemeal parts of the data center while faced with shrinking capital budgets.

To help meet that demand, IBM is introducing Tivoli Live Monitoring Services delivered on the IBM cloud to help companies manage the health and performance of their I.T. resources, including operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and software applications.

Aimed at organizations looking to take advantage of easy-to-use monitoring, Tivoli Live Monitoring Services offers enterprise-class monitoring capabilities as a “service” without the need to deploy hardware, purchase separate software licenses, or engage in extensive software configuration.

The service helps to quickly identify and address potential outages and bottlenecks that threaten application availability before impacting end-users’ notice. When the service detects a potential problem - such as running out of resource capacity - it automatically alerts IT operations and displays the relevant information in a dashboard to help analyze and correct the issue. Using IBM’s autonomic computing capabilities, the service can be programmed to automate certain tasks that enable the affected system to ’self-heal’ when faced with certain issues.

“With digital information as the lifeblood of more organizations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the data center’s functionality mission-critical,” said Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli. “With this new service, IBM is delivering our smartest data center software in which businesses choose and pay for what they need. It’s so easy that we expect most companies can sign up for it on Monday and have it running by Friday. The simplicity is an attractive addition to our service management portfolio.”

IBM also provides these service management capabilities as on-premise software, managed services and software appliances.

With Tivoli Live Monitoring Services, customers can access pre-configured and dedicated instances of IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.1, IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft Applications 6.2 and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Applications 6.2. The service will support the monitoring of up to 500 monitored resources such as operating systems, applications and devices. The service will offer 24x7 phone and email support, and will have extensive self-help content to get running quickly. Additional services will be available through IBM Business Partners. IBM representatives will also be able to offer this service directly.

Services include:

* Touchless Monitoring -- agent-less monitoring per operating system and/or device;
* Distributed Monitoring -- agent-based operating system and application monitoring per operating system and/or application; and
* Performance Services -- historical reporting per operating system useful for capacity planning

The offerings are priced per service or monitored element on a monthly basis. There is a one-time setup fee for on-boarding costs. Terms include minimum of 90 days and run from one to three years. The operating systems supported include Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Microsoft Windows.

For more information on Tivoli Live, see this fact sheet ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/pm/sp/n/ssd03038usen/SSD03038USEN.PDF