IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager Shines a Bright Light in the 'Black Box'

For too long, data centers have been inscrutable 'black boxes' to non-IT executives. As a result, IT executives often have faced uphill battles whenever they tried to assess cross-charges for IT support or to recruit allies to push for smart system upgrades, like virtualization. The stumbling block quite often boiled down to an inability to pinpoint who the 'data hogs' were, to convincingly demonstrate virtualization's savings, or to alleviate worries that users won't receive the resources they require. It boils down to the old business maxim: What gets measured gets managed.

Now, IBM is dispelling the opacity of the distributed data center and enabling customers to quantify value and identify organizational barriers to the fair allocation of server and storage costs. Businesses are able to accomplish this with IBM's enhanced tool— Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager v 7.1—in large shared environments with heterogeneous hardware and multiple software platforms.

IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager v 7.1, in effect, acts like a meter, bringing this capability to track resources consumed by each user, transaction, or application wherever it may occur in the virtualized environment, regardless of the operating system, database, or subsystem used. Moreover, the utilization data can be collected and then associated with the cost center that consumed the resources.

Version 7.1 Brings New Enhancements
In its latest iteration, Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager v 7.1 delivers important enhancements, including:

• Cross-platform reporting capability. Windows is no longer a pre-requisite for viewing the usage reports.
• National language support for everything from Portuguese to Chinese.
• Easy-to-use, web-based administration console.
• Virtualization edition with a reduced price ($499 per server) that allows the aggregation of resource consumption and reporting by user.
• Energy cost tracking capability. Energy is the fastest rising cost in the data center; Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager creates an accurate methodology for apportioning the costs.

The concept behind Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager is really not so new. For more than 30 years, the methodology for performing this type of resource-based chargeback has been widely used in mainframe computing environments. While such methodologies have been available to distributed environments, distributed systems have been slow to embrace usage-based chargebacks. Instead, they have preferred monthly fixed cost allocations. When servers or groups of servers were owned by a single department, it was a simple exercise to assign a recurring monthly debit for the cost of servers that month. As companies entered shared environments, managers in essence negotiated cost-sharing formulae based on perceptions or estimates of usage. This generally worked well, until cost thresholds were breached and managers resisted chargebacks.

Allocating Costs in a Virtualized Environment
With the advent of virtualization in distributed systems, the question arose of the capability to allocate equitably the costs associated with that environment. Among many managers, there was a widespread belief that there was no methodology for assigning costs in a virtualized environment. As a result, some businesses were missing out on the undeniable benefits of virtualization:

• Improved total cost of ownership (TCO). By consolidating resources and increasing the utilization rates of remaining resources, businesses can achieve a rapid return on investment (ROI) with virtualization. Virtualizing increases the ease of migration or fail-over to other physical devices or locations, thereby enhancing system availability and reducing the complexity of disaster-recovery solutions.
• Greater flexibility. Virtualization is agnostic when it comes to vendors and operating platforms. By supporting the pooling of heterogeneous resources, virtualization enables the central management of a system through an enterprise hub to support the dynamic requirements of the business.
• Easier system access. By sharing infrastructure, virtualization provides a resilient foundation that enables better access to infrastructure and information in support of business applications and service-oriented architecture.

In today's environment, there is no need to forgo the benefits of virtualization out of a fear of implementing resource-based chargebacks for the open system. In consolidated and virtualized environments, it's increasingly common for resource-based chargeback systems, like IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, to accurately determine equitable cost allocations for distributed systems. Not only are there sets of metering records for various operating systems, but there is also metering data available to track and allocate costs for specialized environments, including web, file, print, and database servers.

Tailored Reporting and Ease of Use
IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager collects, analyzes, reports, and bills based on usage and costs of shared Windows, UNIX, Linux, i5/OS, and VMware computing resources. Information from the different systems is integrated into a common format that suits the particular businesses' needs. In all, there are 200 report formats to choose from, enabling businesses to view usage and associated costs in the way they find most useful. The reports can be linear or graphical and focus on things such as invoices, top usage, trending, or audit. In addition, there is even the capability to create custom reports.

"IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager v 7.1, in effect, acts like a meter, bringing this capability to track resources consumed by each user, transaction, or application wherever it may occur in the virtualized environment, regardless of the operating system, database, or subsystem used."

The entire operation is controlled by a user interface that permits full control of processing table creation and maintenance, parameter specification, and running the account code conversion and costing process. In its latest edition, Usage and Accounting Manager is Windows-based, so chargebacks don't have to be run on the mainframe. Additionally, IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager's reporting system is web-based, so the end-user can simply log into the system and use a web browser to view reports. With built-in security, businesses can limit the ability of non-administrative users to view specific accounts or reports.

Moreover, to make chargebacks easy to implement for the corporate finance department, the entire system is controlled by Job Runner, a program that fully automates the daily, weekly, or monthly processing. This way, the chargeback administrator automatically finds a series of reports in his or her email in-box describing the IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager processing that was done the previous evening. Anomalies are highlighted, enabling administrators to take immediate corrective actions. End-users have the ability to drill down on specific resource items to determine the cause of possible anomalies and better learn how his function consumes resources from an accurate, reliable report.

With the depth and breadth of reporting that IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager provides, IBM has eliminated another excuse for not implementing virtualization in the data center. Why continue to miss out on the flexibility, consolidation, and efficiency that virtualization can deliver when there's an effective, inexpensive tool like the virtualization edition of Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to monitor and allocate resource consumption?