December 5, 2005
(Computerworld)
IBM Tivoli unveiled two new self-healing software tools last week, as well as a major revision of its IBM Tivoli Monitoring product, which features a new graphical interface to create programs that automatically respond to system problems.
Autonomic computing is gaining a following among infrastructure managers. Victor Kellan is CEO of LAN Solutions Inc., which provides network management services for about 20 companies. He said he's interested in all three IBM self-healing products and has been successfully using IBM's Autonomic Management Engine (AME) for about a year.
"I'm absolutely in favor of anything to further automate processes," Kellan said. "Our position is that this kind of software is the only way to control networks as they get larger. You can't keep throwing bodies at the problems."
Using AME has helped McLean, Va.-based LAN Solutions keep costs down while offering round-the-clock network management, he said.
Kellan said LAN Solutions has found that many customers, especially smaller businesses, are unfamiliar with autonomic software and tend to believe "you've got to have a person doing the monitoring."
Autonomic and self-healing management software products comprise an emerging niche in the $14 billion network and systems management global market, and sales of such products haven't been measured separately, said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC. He said IBM Tivoli primarily competes with Computer Associates International Inc., BMC Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
IBM said its new Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 oversees and fixes IT service-related problems in servers or databases for online applications such as e-mail.
"We have new capability to encode known [problems] in systems so if they are encountered, you can tell the system what action to take," said Ric Telford, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM.
The two new products are IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (CAM) and Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms, Telford said. System Automation can be used to spot failures on servers or operating systems that support complex applications and, using predetermined instructions, automatically return them to service. System automation capabilities have been available from IBM for mainframe users before, but they're now available for distributed systems with Linux, AIX and Windows, he said.
CAM can be used to predict and fix bottlenecks that occur in different systems connected under a service-oriented architecture.
Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 starts at $700 per processor, the three versions of CAM start at $5,000 per processor, and System Automation starts at $1,100 per processor. All are available now.
NEW PRODUCTS
IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.1: Manages and automatically corrects online applications, fixing problems across system components; priced from $700 per processor.
IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager: Includes three products — CAM for SOA, CAM for WebSphere and CAM for Response Time Tracking — that predict and fix bottlenecks in service-oriented architectures; priced from $5,000 per processor.
IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms: Brings mainframe automation to multiple platforms in distributed systems; priced from $1,100 per processor.