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IBMs Tivoli unit late the week of Feb. 20 added four new management products to IBMs Express line of offerings for SMBs.
The four products, which focus on security and storage management as well as provisioning and monitoring, were designed from the ground up to be simple to install and deploy. They provide management of servers, PCs, storage and security.
In addition to simplicity, IBMs design focused on specific problems faced by small and midsize businesses when it comes to managing IT infrastructure, according to Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and market management for Tivoli in Austin, Texas.
“More important are their automatic integration capabilities and best practices built in to address SMB problems around the amount of technical skills they have in their IT organizations,” he said.
Such integration, for example, makes it possible for an agent from the new Tivoli Monitoring Express offering to recognize when a server is out of capacity and automatically signal to the new Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express to provision new server capacity.
“They are designed to work together in a holistic fashion,” Madey said.
The new Tivoli Monitoring Express offering also brings autonomic computing functions to SMBs for the first time. The tool can assess problems a server is experiencing and take corrective action to keep services running.
The tool automatically identifies resources in the SMBs environment and downloads monitors to assess the availability of a business service, and corrects problems such as hung applications across servers, operating systems and databases. It is due April 7.
Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express provides inventory and asset management as well as electronic software distribution of applications, updates and patches.
“TPME lets you take into context various resources connected for a new application or function. When you are distributing new patches to servers or operating systems, you can see the various resources that go into that, target specific servers for the update, [and see] which applications are running and how will they be affected by a patch,” Madey said.
The provisioning software is linked to IBMs Open Process Automation Library, which gives users access to IBMs best practices repository for different IT tasks. “Customers can download best practices to do whatever they want to do, whether its to update software or provision new resources,” Madey said. TPME is due March 31.
Tivoli Identity Manager Express manages the identity of users on IT infrastructure. It can prevent inside security breaches by removing accounts and privileges when employees leave the company.
It also allows users to create security profiles and access for types of users, such as sales people or business partners, and reduces the time it takes set up new accounts for new employees or contractors from days down to minutes. The product is due on Feb. 28.
Tivoli Storage Manager Express manages backup and recovery of data. It can be installed and running in under an hour, and it can be coupled with IBMs Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files so that mission-critical data on PCs and laptops can be automatically backed up. It is due March 17.