Automating the Datacenter with IBM Endpoint Manager

This post was originally published on October 2nd, 2014 by Brad Fisher on IBM developerWorks. It is the first in a series about leveraging IBM Endpoint Manager to automate the management of your datacenter.  Future blog posts will cover topics such as automated cluster patching, automating virtual and physical server builds, automating multi-tier application deployment and automating complex cross-server patching scenarios. Brad Fisher is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure division of IBM.  Brad has over 25 years in the IT industry.  Having held positions in Cloud, Process Automation and Systems Management, most recently Brad has been working in Endpoint Management, focusing on IEM for Datacenters and the IEM for Server Automation solution, and how the Endpoint Management solutions can successfully manage a customers datacenter.

Managing even a simple datacenter entails some pretty complex activities… things like performing server builds, ensuring security compliance on servers, managing both a physical and virtual server environment as well as keeping servers patched.  Just patching is a complex activity as you have to deal with everything from patching single servers to patching business services that span multiple servers as well as patching nodes in a cluster… all while ensuring your servers are in a maintenance window and in some cases ensuring that you can patch business services and clusters while the service still remains available to process workloads.

IBM Endpoint Manager provides a solution called IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters that solves these problems in an elegant, automated manner, freeing up time for IT personnel to focus on other datacenter activities.

IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters value proposition is threefold:

• Increase Effectiveness and Efficiency through higher levels of Automation
• Improve Security posture through continuous configuration compliance
• Facilitate Consolidation of Tools and Teams and manage all platforms with one Interface, so that your valuable resources can work on higher business value tasks

IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters helps improve datacenter performance and security by:

• simplifying Server build and ongoing configuration management by more than 40%
• reducing costs for cluster patching by more than 50%
• increasing patch compliance to 98-99% first-pass success in minutes vs. days or weeks
• continuous Security compliance and policy enforcement with 8,000+ out-of-the-box compliance checks
• increasing IT Efficiency by leveraging automation from our integrated toolsets

With IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters you can sequence automation tasks in the correct order they need to be processed, even in parallel as needed, targeting individual tasks against different servers/groups of servers as necessary.

For a larger view, click the image above.

While there’s tens of thousands of out-of-the-box automation tasks provided by IBM, as well as an active online community that shares automation content they have built, if there’s ever automation content you need that isn’t provided it’s very easy using the included tooling to build your own automation content.

IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters can automate complex tasks in managing your datacenter and significantly reduce labor costs and increase efficiency of IT staff.

For more information see IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters

For videos on IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters, see IBM Endpoint Manager for Datacenters videos.