Provided by: IBM

Application Focus: Cloud Computing                            Industry Focus: Education

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Other Blade server-oriented Case Studies from this company

By selecting an IBM Scalable Modular Data Center solution with APC's InfraStruXure® architecture, IBM designed and built an energy-efficient data center for Bryant at a fraction of the cost of a typical solution. Art Gloster, CIO, comments: "The IBM and APC solution delivered significant capital and operational cost savings, providing a compact yet highly scalable infrastructure. We estimate that the solution is 30 percent more efficient in power and cooling terms alone, both reducing expenditure and underlining the University’s commitment to environmental sustainability."
 

The solution was to implement IBM BladeCenter® H chassis with IBM BladeCenter HS22 blades to improve performance and scalability. The small hardware footprint, combined with the ability to virtualize, provided significant energy savings. SECAR leveraged IBM Systems Director for ease of manageability, including the ability to receive critical system information on IT administrators’ mobile devices. They also use BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager to manage blade I/O and network interconnects, and to boot from the SAN when the hot-spare blade is required.

For more information about SECAR BOHEMIA/Sherlog, visit: www.sherlog.com
 

Winn-Dixie is a Jacksonville, Florida-based grocery chain with more than 600 retail locations throughout the southeastern U.S. Stores range from 25,000 to 50,000 square feet. Faced with an aging IT infrastructure with one server supporting each retail store, Winn-Dixie’s distributed environment was costly to maintain, and individual stores could experience extended outages. For example, when one server went down, a server often had to be sent from a warehouse in another state and then brought up by store staff members. As a result, store outages could last for days.

Business need:

The company needed a cost-effective and easily managed solution to replace its aging distributed IT infrastructure and quickly enable disaster recovery.

Solution:

Winn-Dixie consolidated more than 600 stand-alone servers at individual grocery stores into a centralized data center at company headquarters. Using IBM AIX® and IBM PowerVM™ virtualization technologies, the solution supports 16 stores on a single IBM BladeCenter® JS22 blade server, mirrored to a nearby facility as well as to a remote disaster recovery location.

Benefits:

The solution redirected $5 million capital cost savings to store remodeling, improved application performance by 5 to 10 times, and reduced disaster recovery time from days to hours.
 

Prior to INTTRA’s founding, shipping was booked by phone, fax, and other non-standardized processes that were time consuming and manually intensive. INTTRA’s e-commerce portal has revolutionized the industry. “We’ve created a global, standardized network so that the world’s shippers and the world’s carriers can connect seamlessly to one another,” explains Ken Bloom, president and CEO of INTTRA. After growing 1100 percent in the last seven years, the company now accounts for 10 percent of the world’s containerized trade, originating 10.7 million containers in 2008.

Meeting the IT needs of a dynamic business like INTTRA is a tall order. “In a highgrowth company like ours, where we’ve seen almost double growth every year, scalability in both our processing ability and our storage capacity is critical,” says Jeffrey Pattison, CIO of INTTRA.

In the past few years, INTTRA has consolidated their servers on IBM BladeCenter LS20, BladeCenter LS21, and IBM Power® 570 servers. They’ve achieved a 95 percent virtualization rate by virtualizing at every tier. “Virtualization has been a key driver,” says Pattison. “Not only is it good for the environment, but it’s also good for business. It’s given us a lot more flexibility.”

Find out more about INTTRA
 

Other Blade server-oriented SOLUTIONS from this company

IBM's innovative approach to blades delivers a new kind of IT building block that helps improve reliability, accessibility, and serviceability. The result of IBM's innovation is a blade solution that is easier to manage, uses less power, produces significantly less heat, has longer life spans, and is easy to set up and scale.

LightEdge Solutions got its start in 1996 as an Internet Service Provider in Des Moines, Iowa. You wouldn’t recognize that young start-up company today, with an expanded portfolio of voice, data and IT service offerings, four data centers and some 4,000 clients from coast to coast.

LightEdge chose to standardize on IBM BladeCenter, IBM System x and IBM System Storage DS4800.

As a result of the implementation, LightEdge has been able to reduce the SLA for response and repair times from four hours to two. They've seen improved availability and scalability, easier maintenance and management through the single-vendor platform, and improved reliability for Oracle E-Business Suite.
 

Tivoli Security Compliance Manager is a security policy compliance product that acts as an early warning system by identifying security vulnerabilities and security policy violations for small, medium and large businesses.

Tivoli Security Compliance Manager helps organizations define consistent security policies and monitor compliance of these defined security policies. Security policies can be based on both internal security requirements and industry-standard security policies.
 

Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for files enables customers to implement policy-based, real time data management and protection and point-in-time based data recovery.

Tivoli CDP provides policy-based, continuous, real-time data protection for file servers and for multiple users' systems. Instead of waiting for a scheduled backup to occur, this solution backs up your most important files the moment they are saved, in real time. When a file is modified, Tivoli CDP replicates the file to disk, according to the policy you set and how the solution is deployed. Consequently, users can easily restore the latest version of the file they need—helping minimize recovery times. The result: improved backup window, backup and recovery times, and backup granularity.
 

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager provides a secure, automated and policy-based user management solution that helps effectively manage user identities throughout their lifecycle across entire IT environment.

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager provides a secure, automated and policy-based user management solution that helps effectively manage user identities throughout their lifecycle across both legacy and e-business environments. Key features include:

• Reduces help-desk load by using Web self service and password reset/sync interfaces
• Cuts elapsed turn-on time, automates routine administrative tasks and helps eliminate errors
• Assists in addressing compliance issues. Quickly respond to internal audits and regulatory mandates
• Automates business processes related to changes in user identities by using life-cycle management
• Centralized control and local autonomy, which can ensure security and consistent policy on your most sensitive systems
• Enhances integration via extensive APIs
• Choose to manage target systems either with an agent or agentless

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Express can help you manage an increasing number of users with fewer resources by establishing a central point to manage user rights. Through a robust workflow engine, Tivoli Identity Manager Express enables you to automate the user provisioning process, including approvals and account creation, as well as the user deprovisioning process to mitigate the risk of invalid accounts and privileges. Automating these processes can help you maintain an ongoing record of access-rights changes -- and thereby reduce the amount of time needed to gather the information required to comply with security audits. Other customer benefits include:

• Helps streamline user account set-up and turn-off reducing the time spend to create accounts to minutes - not days
• Enhances security and facilitates compliance through the aggregation of disparate data and issuance of audit reports
• Quick time-to-value with a solution that is easy to install, easy to deploy and easy to use

Tivoli Access Manager is an award-winning, policy-based, access control security solution for e-business and enterprise applications, featuring Web-based single sign-on and distributed administration.

IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-business is a versatile solution for authentication and authorization problems. It manages growth and complexity, controls management costs, and addresses the difficulty of executing security policies across a wide range of Web and application resources. It also:

• Defines and manages centralized authentication, access, and audit policy for a broad range of business initiatives
• Establishes new audit and reporting service which collects audit data from multiple enforcement points as well as from other platforms and security applications
• Enables flexible SSO to Web-based applications that can span multiple sites or domains with a range of SSO options, to eliminate help-desk calls and other security problems associated with multiple passwords
• Leverages common security policy model with the Tivoli Access Manager family of products to extend support to other resources
• Provides a modular authorization architecture that separates security code from apps

• Automate log aggregation, correlation and analysis
• Recognize, investigate and respond to incidents automatically
• Streamline incident tracking and handling
• Enable monitoring and enforcement of policy
• Provide comprehensive reporting for compliance efforts

Tivoli's Security Operations Manager automates many repetitive, time-intensive activities required for effective security operations. The result is an efficient, cost-effective approach to security operations.
 

This solution is a new software and hardware solution for rapid implementation of e-mail archiving, discovery and compliance. It adds high value e-mail archiving software to hardware and storage installations.

Benefits

• Helps companies address immediate and future challenges with their growing e-mail systems
  • Retain e-mail for compliance and legal discovery
  • Improve e-mail system operations and optimize storage
• Simple, easy and fast implementation saves companies time and money
  • Pre-loaded and pre-tested configuration
  • Quick, consistent and repeatable installations

Benefits

• Scalable, modular, secure
• Reduced implementation risk
• Affordably priced
• Simplified acquisition process
• Lower TCO
• Faster time to market
• Freedom of choice
• Highly secure
• Reduce costs by 1/4
• Reduce power by 1/3
• Reduce floor space by 1/2
• Integrate everything as 1

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager automates change and configuration management for servers and clients while ensuring their compliance with business policies.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager helps organizations with provisioning, configuration and maintenance of servers and virtual servers, operating systems, middleware, applications, storage and network devices acting as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers. Users can benefit from ease of use enhancements, better reporting and streamlined use scenarios that provide more out of the box value. Additional enhancements include:

• Improved discovery and reporting of datacenter resources
• Operating system imaging and bare metal provisioning
• Software distribution and patch management over a scalable secure infrastructure
• Automated deployment of servers through software templates
• Simplification and automation of datacenter tasks
• Compliance reporting and remediation.

These capabilities allow companies to manage the complete lifecycle of datacenter and distributed resources from initial provisioning to patching and configuration maintenance to resource repurposing or end of life.
 

Companies of all sizes who want a lightweight, Web-based solution to efficiently and cost-effectively automate inventory and software distribution management can benefit from Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express is an easy to use inventory management and software distribution solution. In addition to detailed inventory tracking and management, it has the ability to leverage a company-wide distribution system for managing the delivery and updating of business software through a secure, Web-based interface.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager Express will help you identify non-compliant users and quickly deploy critical software updates to reduce end-user downtime and the need for costly help-desk support. Flexible "push" and "pull" capabilities help administrators easily create and deliver the right software packages to individual laptops, desktops and servers that are in need of software updates. Users can also self-install whenever it's convenient.
 

All customers interested in automating the management and deployment of software images for servers and clients in their IT environment can benefit from this solution. It performs remote 'bare metal' or pristine image deployments.

With Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment, customers can discover key hardware information from a bare metal server. From there it can identify the appropriate image to be deployed and automatically install that image. With the benefit of the Universal Image and driver injection at installation, numerous hardware types can be supported with the same core image because the hardware unique drivers are handled separately. This means less confusion about what operating system to install, fewer problems with missing drivers, and a better overall approach to managing images across the environment.

In addition, Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment can create a file-based image. Each file only needs to be captured and stored once rather than a full image. As a result, the process for capturing the image is faster, the number of images that you need to manage is fewer and deployment and re-imaging new systems is faster than alternative methods.
 

IBM Director is an integrated, easy-to-use suite of tools that provide customers with flexible systems management capabilities to help realize maximum system availability and help lower IT costs. With IBM Director, IT administrators can view and track the hardware configuration of remote systems in detail and monitor the usage and performance of critical components, such as processors, disks and memory.

Benefits of the IBM Director

• An easy-to-use, integrated suite of tools with consistent look-and-feel and single point of management simplifies IT tasks
• Automated, proactive capabilities that help reduce IT costs and maximize system availability
• Streamlined, intuitive user interface to get started faster and accomplish more in a shorter period of time
• Open, standards-based design and broad platform and operating support enable customers to manage heterogeneous environments from a central point
• Can be extended to provide more choice of tools from the same user interface

Microsoft Windows customers want to integrate Linux into their environment, but many don’t know how to start.

Now IBM and Novell, along with Centeris, make it easy to move File/Print or Web /Database Application workloads to Linux, saving you thousands on license and support fees. ISSLE is designed to easily integrate these workloads into existing Windows and Active Directory environments. It allows customers to manage these Linux servers as if they were Windows servers, using familiar Windows-based management utilities.

The Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise is a software bundle that contains SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell with DB2 Express-C and WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition from IBM, along with Likewise™ Management Suite from Centeris, all tailored for IBM system x or IBM BladeCenter servers. The bundle is ideal for small and medium businesses, as well as various organizations within larger enterprises, for file and print serving, web and database serving, and application development. All software components of the Integrated Stack for SUSE Linux Enterprise are integrated in a seamless installation process and can be installed in one single effort, either by IBM and Novell channel partners or by customers.
 

Tivoli Storage Manager Express is an easily deployed solution that provides a disk based backup system for fast recovery of lost data, and a tape system for off-site storage of critical data.

Tivoli Storage Manager Express is an easy to implement data backup and recovery solution that provides disk based backup and fast recovery of lost data as well as tape backup for off-site storage of critical data. Tivoli Storage Manager Express:

• Can be installed, configured and conducting its first full backup in less than 30 minutes
• Provides e-mail reminders and on-screen guidance about necessary management tasks without the need for a dedicated storage administrator
• Has agents that support backup for SQL and Microsoft Exchange applications, so you ensure your environment is protected
• Integrates easily and cost-efficiently with Tivoli Storage Manager Enterprise Edition to protect your storage software investment and your business scales and grows

Small and mid-size customers interested in monitoring the performance and availability of applications, operating systems and systems to detect problems and rapidly respond to potential problems will find this solution useful.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) Express, designed for small to mid-sized organizations, delivers management and monitoring capabilities in a solution that is easy to install, easy to deploy, and easy to use, while reducing the complexity of managing heterogeneous environments.

With ITM Express, smaller businesses can manage bottlenecks, performance impacts, and outages from a single centralized portal. ITM Express provides users with access to rich availability data that can be used to identify problems early and enable rapid fixes before end users experience significant impact to their performance.

ITM Express collects data from applications, systems and subsystems and sends it to the management server for collection, filtering, correlation and root-cause analysis. Using the customizable graphical portal to view and monitor the business, ITM Express delivers the vital data you need in an easy-to-use interface. At a glance, you can see how your critical IT systems are performing.
 

IBM®, SAP and Intel have created an 'out-of-the-box" appliance that enables customers to deploy SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator in an easy, cost-effective way. The appliance solution features IBM BladeCenter with HS21 blades, IBM System Storage DS4700, IBM General Parallel File System (SLES) and Novell SUSE Linux.

Benefits

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator appliance solution provides dramatic enhancements in BI query response times, empowering information workers to become more effective and productive enabling faster and more effective decision-making within the enterprise.
 

The System Cluster 1350 from IBM:

• Helps reduce time and resources necessary to deploy Linux® clusters
• Provides single point-of-control to simplify management and enhance cluster availability
• Offers a highly scalable solution for high-performance or commercial applications and server consolidation
• Provides a single point-of-contact to simplify access to warranty services

Today, many businesses are building their own Linux clusters using commodity hardware, standard interconnects and networking technology, open source software, and in-house or third-party applications. Despite the advantages offered by these systems, the expense and complexity of assembling, integrating, testing and managing these clusters from disparate, piece-part components often outweigh any benefits gained.

IBM has designed the IBM System Cluster 1350 to help address these challenges. Now clients can benefit from IBM’s extensive experience with clustered Linux computers to help minimize this complexity and risk. Using advanced Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron™, and IBM PowerPC® and POWER5+™ processor-based server nodes, proven cluster management software and optional high-speed interconnects, the Cluster 1350 offers the best of IBM and third-party technology. As a result, clients can speed up installation of a Linux cluster, simplify its management, and reduce mean time to payback.
 

• Helps customers maintain control over the cost of computing by reducing license administration requirements and the need for separate licenses on each blade server. - By creating a simple to administer and flexible environment, users will be able to configure, re-provision and expand on demand within an IBM BladeCenter chassis with up to 14 blade servers without having to purchase additional copies of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server.
• This licensing model will help customers quickly and efficiently implement scalable, multi-tier, and heterogeneous Linux workloads.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM BladeCenter® provides customers with the ability to purchase a single SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offering and deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on any IBM BladeCenter server configured within a BladeCenter chassis, including Intel x86-based, EM64T-based, AMD64-based, or POWER-based IBM BladeCenter servers. Customers now have the freedom and flexibility to configure, re-provision and expand on demand within an IBM BladeCenter chassis with up to 14 blade servers without having to purchase additional copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. These offerings are available when purchasing an IBM BladeCenter Chassis.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM BladeCenter® T provides customers with the same freedom and flexibility within an IBM BladeCenter chassis T with up to 8 blade servers as they have within an IBM BladeCenter chassis. These offerings are available when purchasing an IBM BladeCenter T Chassis.
 

IBM Quality Insight can help automotive companies accelerate component problem recognition and resolution, while making effective use of historical data to help prevent future failures and reduce warranty costs.

The solution combines powerful data management software with industry-specific processes to integrate data across the enterprise and beyond. Implemented on an IBM BladeCenter with HS21 blade servers, IBM Quality Insight may include IBM WebSphere Information Integrator, IBM DB2 Universal Data Warehouse Edition, DB2 Intelligent Miner, DB2 Web Query Tool, DB2 Content Manager, IBM Lotus® Workplace™, WebSphere Portal and IBM Parametric Analysis Center.