IBM, BladeLogic Boost Automation

IBM and BladeLogic Inc., the David and Goliath of autonomic computing, are ratcheting up automation capabilities for their respective solutions that streamline the movement of workloads.

At the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., this week, IBM will introduce new workload-balancing capabilities in its WebSphere application servers that eliminate the need for third-party software.

The new functions "advance the ability to move workloads around according to set priorities and classes of service that will allow for rapid movement of application work to various application servers," said Alan Ganek, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, in Somers, N.Y.

The capabilities will integrate with the IBM Tivoli Orchestrator tool, which will allow the servers to be made available, Ganek added.

BladeLogic this week will roll out Operations Manager 6, the latest version of its data center automation software suite. A key enhancement is the introduction of templates that move an IT administrators capabilities beyond simply managing hardware to managing and modeling services within the data center, said officials of the Waltham, Mass., company.

IBM offers new version of its WebSphere application server. Click here to read more.

Administrators will be able to manage everything from Apache Web servers and Microsoft Corp. Exchange servers to BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic platform as a single collection of resources rather than as separate entities residing on diverse hardware, officials said. The result is that data center resources—from hardware to applications—can respond more dynamically to business demands.

FreshDirect Inc., a Long Island City, N.Y., online grocery service, is using Operations Manager 6 in conjunction with other technology, including servers from Egenera Inc. and switching offerings from NetScaler Inc., to create a utility environment in its data center, said Chief Technology Officer Myles Trachtenberg.

The company has 46 servers divided into two clusters and often has to migrate its customers from one cluster to another. In the past, that would have meant having to shut down the clusters for a short period of time. Now, the migration can happen while both clusters continue to run, Trachtenberg said.

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