IBM Systems and Technology

Data Sheet

IBM System x

IBM Systems Director

Standard Edition for
System x
Dramatically reduce operational complexity and costs.
Signicantly increase agility and efficiency.

Highlights

Designed to reduce operational complexity, improve the efficiency of IT staff and

systems, and help control costs while
meeting business requirements for
service delivery.
IBM Systems Director Standard Edition
v6.2.1 makes it easier and more costeffective for you to purchase the capabilities you need to manage IBM systems
versus buying individual parts.
The platform management foundation
provided by IBM Systems Director
Standard Edition streamlines the way
both physical and virtual systems are
managed across servers, storage
and network.

Your x86 systems are indispensible. In todays environment nearly everything is automated, nearly everything is sending data. Devices of all kinds
are smarter. Your systems should help you manage this data and automation turning all of that data into real business insight.
In order to keep those systems running and make the best business decisions, you need to simplify and integrate the management of your physical and virtual devicesall of your IT resourcesunder an easy to
acquire, comprehensive set of tools.
IBM Systems Director Standard Edition for System x offers a broad set of
tools to help you manage your IBM System x servers in a single
package. Purchased and supported under a single contract, you get the
following features:

Remote keyboard, video and mouse control

Simplied management for physical and virtual devices
Energy consumption monitoring and management
Operating System deployment
Basic virtualization management
Discovery, monitoring and management of network devices
Upward Integration module for Microsoft System Center adds the
power of IBM Systems Director to your System Center Console
Upward Integration module for VMware vCenter provides hardware
management capabilities inside the vCenter Console

IBM Systems and Technology

Data Sheet

IBM System x

Systems Director Standard Edition is designed to dramatically

reduce IT costs by helping you to optimize your servers, storage systems and network devices. With tools to automate repetitive tasks and integrate functions in a single interface, the
solution helps improve control and management of your entire
System x infrastructure. Systems Director standard edition can
help you:

Reduce complexity and risk of managing IT operations

Manage and monitor IT costs by optimizing and automating
across components
Speed up deployment of systems management tools

Becoming more efficient

IBM Systems Director helps administrators automate data center operations. Built-in automation capabilities enable IT
administrators to schedule updates and conguration changes to
proactively avoid problems, and reduce the administrative burden of routine maintenance. Featuring simplied discovery and
automated conguration, compute resources can be quickly
added for management. Powerful grouping capabilities with
nesting of resources help organize resources for efficient operation. A simplied interface is used to create action plans for
events that can trigger automatic responses such as email
notication or task execution.

IBM Systems Director Standard Edition for System x provides all the tools
needed to build the backbone of system management on IBM systems

Easy to use
IBM Systems Director features a user-friendly, web-based interface that helps guide administrators with an extensive array of
wizards. Resource views of systems and groups clearly show
relationships between physical and virtual resources.
Customizable dashboards summarize critical resources and
provide drilldown for detailed status.

To help drive system compliance and consistency, the update

management feature can automatically notify users of out-ofdate systems and provide simplied tasks to download and
install updates.

Quick time to value is provided by simplied deployment,

installation and update process with default and custom installation options. A welcome page informs and educates administrators with summarized status reports and tutorials and assistance
with common tasks.

IBM Systems and Technology

Data Sheet

IBM System x

a clear view of the relationships and health status of IT system

components. IBM Systems Director Express Edition provides
an affordable foundation for systems management. It provides
the integrated tools needed to efficiently visualize and communicate the relationships of physical and virtual systems that are
discovered, monitor their health, dene and receive threshold
alerts, and update system rmware and operating environments.
Built-in automation capabilities enable IT administrators to
schedule updates and conguration changes to proactively
avoid problems, and reduce the administrative burden of routine maintenance.

IBM Systems Director helps simplify IT operations by

providing a consistent management interface across the
breadth of IBM systems: System x, BladeCenter, Power
Systems, System z and select IBM storage and network
solutions. Non-IBM x86 servers can also be managed by
IBM Systems Director.1

Prepackaged offerings to meet your

needs
IBM offers a complete set of platform and enterprise service
management solutions that are designed to reduce complexity,
manage virtualization, and manage energy of your IBM servers
throughout the operational life cycle. IBM Systems Director
Editions provide choices to select the package of simple-to-use
automated management solutions from IBM based on your
needsfrom basic hardware management to more advanced
cross-enterprise management. IBM Systems Director Editions
are packaged to make it easier and more cost effective to purchase the features needed to manage servers, storage and networks in your data center. They let you seamlessly scale up as
your infrastructure evolves and address major concerns associated with managing both physical and virtual environments.

IBM Systems Director Standard Edition (Available on

System x and POWER systems) includes features that can
reduce the time and effort for workload deployment, as well as
optimize energy usage and capacity. IBM Systems Director
Standard Edition includes all of the capabilities of the Express
Edition, and adds advanced deployment, monitoring and control features under the same console. With Systems Director
Standard Edition on System x, you can also remotely take over
servers keyboard, video and mouse and even attach local disks
to remote servers. Clients who may be facing energy cost or
capacity concerns get the benet of extensive electrical power
and thermal monitoring capabilities across the data center. This
edition also expands the discovery and health monitoring capabilities of the Express Edition to include networking systems.

IBM Systems Director Editions are management solutions that

help you reduce operational complexity, improve the efficiency
of IT staff and systems, and help control costs while meeting
business requirements for service delivery.

IBM Systems Directors comprehensive systems management

tools address todays challenges to ensure high availability and
quality of services to meet business requirements for service
delivery. To get the benets of virtualization, energy and network management, you need state-of-the-art tools to view
and effectively manage systems. IBM Systems Director offers
among the best hardware management tools in the industry.

IBM Systems Director Express Edition (Available on

System x and POWER systems) includes a set of management tools that can reduce operational complexity by providing

IBM Systems and Technology

Data Sheet

IBM System x

Managing virtualization

Managing the network

Virtualization has transformed IT and how it relates to business. Virtualized solutions unlock IT resources to achieve business goals by enhancing resource utilization, improving service
levels and improving availability. Virtualization benets extend
beyond the data center by enabling faster time to market for
new services based upon market demands. IBM Systems
Director provides integrated virtualization management to help
achieve the full potential of virtualization. Through one user
interface, both virtual and physical resources can be managed.

IBM Systems Director Network Control provides integration

of server, storage, and network management for virtualization
environments across platforms. IBM Systems Director Network
Control will discover, manage, monitor, and congure vendorbased network devices, leveraging existing IBM Systems
Director functionality and integration of vendor applications. It
enables a unied view to simplify network management tasks
and reduce complexity and costs. Network Control also provides higher bandwidth and converged fabrics to help eliminate
server, storage and network sprawl.

A key feature of IBM Systems Director is IBM Systems

Director VMControl. VMControl represents a transformation
from managing virtualization to using virtualization to better
manage your IT infrastructure. VMControl simplies the
management of virtual environments across multiple virtualization technologies and hardware platforms, freeing you from
silos of virtualization and delivering enterprise-wide visibility
and control.

Managing Operating System deployment

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment delivers
the ability to automate remote deployment of operating systems, eliminating costly on-site support. It allows clients to
standardize on fewer Golden Master images for heterogeneous systems through Universal Image, Driver Injection, and
Optimized Image Repository features. Drivers specic to a certain server model can be injected by automatically recognizing
hardware variations and injecting the appropriate drivers at time
of deployment. This technology allows you to reduce both the
number of images and the storage required for them.

Managing energy
IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager is a unique
energy management software tool that can provide a single view
of the actual energy usage across the systems and facilities
within your data center. It measures, monitors and manages the
energy to help you understand and control data center energy
consumption and costs. The scope of energy management can
include facility providers as well, thus enabling a more complete
view of energy consumption within the data center. Active
Energy Manager helps you maintain service availability in your
existing energy envelope, and improves energy efficiency to
avoid costly data center upgrades or new construction.

Virtual Media Key

With the Integrated Management Module Virtual Media Key,
you can take control of the remote servers keyboard, mouse
and video from a local machine. You can also attach the
remote server to the local disks on your management system.

IBM Systems and Technology

Data Sheet

IBM System x

the integration of IBM hardware management functionality,

providing affordable, basic management of physical and virtual
environments to reduce the time and effort required for routine
system administration.

This provides complete remote management under any OS or

pre-OS environment. You can install software with remote
graphical console including KVM. You can boot the remote
server from oppy or CD on your laptop and perform rmware
updates or operating system Installation.

Enabling Smarter Computing

Upward Integration module for Microsoft
System Center

IBM Systems Director is the platform management foundation

for achieving Smarter Systems. An integral component of IBMs
Smarter Systems portfolio, IBM Systems Director helps transform system-level management. As a single point of control,
IBM Systems Director helps give IT managers the tools and
capabilities needed to perform centralized service management,
allowing them to control, monitor, congure and manage
all parts of the infrastructure, from servers to storage to
networkseven power consumption. This type of increased
visibility and control helps to create a highly integrated, optimized and automated IT infrastructure across all platforms,
helping contribute to reduced complexity and cost.

The IBM Upward Integration for Microsoft System Center,

V3.0 integrates the management features of the System x and
BladeCenter servers with Microsoft System Center.
IBM expands Microsoft System Center server management
capabilities by integrating IBM hardware management functionality, providing affordable, basic management of physical
and virtual environments to reduce the time and effort required
for routine system administration. It provides the discovery,
conguration, monitoring, event management and power monitoring needed to reduce cost and complexity through server
consolidation and simplied management.

IBM Systems Director combined with easy integration with

Tivoli, IBMs Integrated Service Management architecture,
enables comprehensive and efficient management of IT
resources through a single, unied, consistent management
interface. IBMs Integrated Service Management provides
visibility, control and automation across the business
infrastructure.

Upward Integration module for VMware

vCenter
The IBM Integration Suite for VMware provides IT administrators with the ability to integrate the management features of
the System x and BladeCenter servers with VMware vSphere.
VMware ESXi management capabilities are expanded through

For more information

Contact your IBM representative or IBM Business
Partner or visit:
IBM Systems Director: ibm.com/systems/software/director/

Copyright IBM Corporation 2011

IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, New York 10589

IBM System x: ibm.com/systems/x/index.html

IBM BladeCenter: ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/

Produced in the United States

October 2011
All Rights Reserved

Tivoli: ibm.com/software/tivoli/

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, BladeCenter, Systems Director

Active Energy Manager and System x are trademarks or registered
trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation
in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other
IBM trademarked terms are marked on their rst occurrence in this
information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate
U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time
this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered
or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of
IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark
information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries, or both.
Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service
marks of others.
1

Use of IBM Systems Director with non-IBM systems requires purchase of

an agent license.

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