Great IBM Tivoli ESM Recap, quick stab at mapping to DCAB

John Willis posted a great recap of Enterprise System Management moves IBM Tivoli has been doing over the recent years. This has great applicability to my attempt at defining a Data Center Automation Blueprint.

Here is the link to his posting - Mission Impossible It’s always fun reading the history behind things to.

So now I’m going to attempt mapping this to the 6 functional DCA categories from the blueprint (this may take a couple attempts as I don’t have all day to work on this) and also I’m going from memory and performing numerous Google searches on the Internet for public information (ex: articles of acquisitions, current and former product pages - btw if you’ve never checked out the wayback machine your missing out):

Resource Reconciliation: Tivoli Application Dependency Discover Manager (former Collation) and also I would assume some components from the MRO Software acquisition around Asset managment

Process Orchestration: Tivoli Provisioning Manager (former ThinkDynamics)…not sure how well this product stacks up against more recent “Run Book Automation” technologies that were acquired by it’s main competitors (e.g., iConclude now in HP portfolio, RealOps now in BMC portfolio) in head-to-head situations.

Configuration & Change: So here seems to be a big hole from what I’ve seen/heard that allegedly Tivoli Configuration Manager and/or Provisioning Manager attempt to fill. I just can’t see that as a strength compared to what HP has now with the Opsware acquisition (e.g., CCM for applictions/system/network/storage). Maybe I’m overlooking something here…any thoughts or insights out their from people who have compared would be appreciated.

Security & Protection: I need to spend some time (*todo) looking through what they purchased with ISS, Watchguard while they also acquired some assets through Micromuse (who acquired GuardedNet) and whatever the previous Tivoli capabilities were.

Performance & Capacity: Some of the former Micromuse (Micromuse had acquired Quallaby) and Candle product fit here along with some of the Rational products. Another acquisition that wasn’t mentioned that should have some fit here was Vallent (telco centric but depending on the data center may have a play here)

Availability & Notification: Tivoli Netcool (e.g., Micromuse acquisition) was huge move (in my opinion) that had some great impact in so many different areas (well beyond monitoring the data center)! Some of the former Candle products would fit here also.

Beyond the 6 functional areas currently you could fit the MRO Software acquisition (Tivoli Service Request Manager) in the Service Desk bucket and Cognos. We will have to wait and see if they apply it at the dashboard level or at a point currently being discussed as another functional area of the model called “analytics.”

Again, this is a first pass and I need to get back on top of some other things I”m working on. In the weeks ahead as the blueprint gets closer to being solidified I’ll revisit this. Hope it’s helpful for now and thanks again to John for his write-up.