When you deploy Systems Director, it discovers all resources (platforms, OSs, physical and virtual servers, voice and data networks, fault-tolerance clusters, storage devices and SANs) and brings them under management…then discovers new resources any time you add them to the system.

1. October 2011
IBM Systems Director offers
Heterogeneous Management of all IBM
(plus other select) system resources
Analytics, Customer Experience & Marketing (ACEM)
Jeff Cotrupe, Global Program Director

2. IBM Systems Director offers Heterogeneous Management
of all IBM (plus other select) system resources
—and serious capex/opex savings potential
Jeff Cotrupe, Global Program Director
OSSCS and ACEM Research Programs
Stratecast, a division of Frost & Sullivan
If you are an IT professional, here are two tightly-intertwined challenges you likely face at this moment:
lack of integration across your IT infrastructures—disparate systems across the organization that do not
work together effectively, or at all—and the complexity inherent in those systems. Of course, there are
plenty of reasons for this:
1. The sheer diversity of devices dotting the network and system landscape.
2. Purpose-built systems that support, or once supported, specific initiatives or services. “Purpose-
built,” as we know, often translates into “tough to manage.”
3. Our collective dependence on distributed applications to serve increasingly mobile workforces.
4. Mergers and acquisitions. M&A certainly creates challenges for all parts of the merging
organizations; but those of us in IT know, all too well, how challenging it can be to integrate the
patchwork quilt of disparate IT resources and functionality left in the wake of M&A activity.
5. Complexity and non-integration also make it difficult to configure and allocate devices to the
task at hand. As a result, companies expend too much working capital (capex) purchasing more
resources than they need, and operating expenditures (opex) increase, too, as companies pay for
the resources to operate and manage it all.
As IBM’s Dexter Henderson, Vice President and Business Line Executive, Systems Software, said at
IBM Pulse, “IT complexity and lack of integration are causing organizations to spend between 60 and
70 percent of their budgets just to monitor and manage existing systems.”
Stratecast believes the first step toward a broad-based solution that addresses all of this is
unified platform management. IBM Systems Director provides unified platform management of all
IBM resources in the IT environment, which we term Heterogeneous Management, while managing
select non-IBM resources, too. In short, Systems Director provides command & control for all IBM
system resources (and, through industry standards, selected resources from other manufacturers) in the
data center. Those resources include IBM System z and System x; IBM Power Systems; IBM
BladeCenter; IBM Storage Systems; select non-IBM servers (x86), z/VM, VMware and PowerVM; and
© Stratecast (A Division of FROST & SULLIVAN), 2011 Page 2

3. operating systems from Microsoft Windows; Linux on x86 platforms to AIX, IBM i and Linux
platforms including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and IBM AIX
Version 7.1.
Here are the specific management capabilities it offers across that broad range of resources:
• Discovery. When you deploy Systems Director, it discovers all resources (platforms, OSs,
physical and virtual servers, voice and data networks, fault-tolerance clusters, storage devices
and SANs) and brings them under management…then discovers new resources any time you
add them to the system.
• Inventory. Systems Director provides inventory management of all resources, and allocates
them for provisioning new services. As resources are added to and removed from the system,
and as individual resources undergo changes, inventory management captures all updates in the
data repository to present a real-time view of all system resources and status. “You can’t
provision what you can’t see”—and Systems Director lets you see exact current status of all
resources.
• Resource monitoring, event notification and status reporting—and system health.
Systems Director continuously monitors all resources, notifies IT of events that impact the
system, and provides status reports. That covers you on a device-by-device level; but Systems
Director goes a step further by offering views of overall system health, to ensure that the entire
system is functioning within accepted parameters and to quickly identify trends and conditions.
• Configuration. Systems Director gives you the systems management granularity to configure
all resources for optimized performance and capacity to meet changing workload requirements.
Bottom line: administrators can help your organization improve overall service and
performance by tailoring and optimizing workloads that allocate specific resources to specific
tasks/functions/teams.
• System updates. A big part of the value of effective systems management is, or ought to be, to
automate repetitive (read: mind-numbing, mundane) tasks, thus freeing you and your team to
focus more on delivering strategic value to your organization. Another example of how Systems
Director does this is by enabling you to quickly execute system-wide updates instead of having
to update resources or groupings individually.
By combining Systems Director with Tivoli multivendor management, an organization can achieve
Integrated Service Management of all physical and virtual devices from all sources “on a single pane of
glass,” and management that aligns all of IT’s moving parts with the business. Yet, the benefits don’t
stop there. According to Henderson, effective systems management not only delivers internal
efficiencies and savings but also supports customer relationship management (CRM) and enhances
customer satisfaction.
Jindal Group: 100 percent uptime for core business applications and capex savings
of 50 percent
The B C Jindal Group of companies is one of the leading business conglomerates in India. Founded as
a manufacturer of steel pipes and fittings, Jindal Group has diversified into a manufacturer of cold
rolled strips and galvanized sheet steel, with new businesses in polyester, metalized and biaxial films, as
well as photographic goods. Jindal Group deployed IBM Systems Director to manage both IBM and
other vendors’ systems, including its SAP solution infrastructure that operates on the IBM Power 750
© Stratecast (A Division of FROST & SULLIVAN), 2011 Page 3

4. Express server with POWER7 processors, supporting seven virtual servers to run multiple business
applications. Jindal has also changed over from time-consuming manual backup processes to IBM
Tivoli Storage Manager, with IBM System Storage DS4700, DS3950 and DS4300 disk arrays, along
with an IBM System Storage TS3494 tape library.
The results, thus far, are substantial and far-reaching. Jindal now enjoys nearly 100 percent uptime for
core business applications on the IBM Power 750 server, and is saving approximately 50 percent on
projected capital expenditures (capex). It is also saving more than 60 percent on tape capacity, thanks to
advanced data compression, and is reaping increased user productivity through automated data backup.
Systems Director is empowering it to do all of this with just one administrator managing its entire
enterprise IT infrastructure—saving Jindal the equivalent of one full-time employee. “For both Tivoli
and Systems Director, the administrator simply logs in to a control panel and considers if manual action
is needed. These are both excellent pieces of system automation software that help us reduce costs and
increase efficiency,” said Mr. R D Malav, Vice President of Information Technology, B C Jindal India.
“We still have some standalone applications on the original servers where there is no reason to change;
and for other systems we deploy the latest processors and full virtualization. The beauty of the IBM
Power infrastructure is that it has the scalability to grow with us.”
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