Context

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Details

IBM® Tivoli® System Automation manages the availability of applications running in Linux® systems or clusters on xSeries, zSeries, iSeries, pSeries, and AIX systems or clusters. It consists of the following features:

High-availability and resource monitoring

IBM Tivoli System Automation provides a high-availability environment. High availability describes a system that is continuously available and that has a self-healing infrastructure to prevent the downtime caused by system problems. A self-healing infrastructure detects improper operation of systems, transactions, and processes, and initiates corrective action without disrupting users. IBM Tivoli System Automation offers mainframe-like high availability by using fast detection of outages and sophisticated knowledge about application components and their relationships. It provides quick and consistent recovery of failed resources and whole applications either in place or on another system of a Linux cluster or AIX cluster without any operator intervention. Therefore it relieves operators from manual monitoring and remembering application components and relationships, and thereby eliminates operator errors.

Policy-based automation

IBM Tivoli System Automation allows the configuration of high-availability systems through the use of policies that define the relationships among the various components. These policies can be applied to existing applications with minor modifications. When the relationships are established, IBM Tivoli System Automation will assume responsibility for managing the applications on the specified nodes as configured. This action reduces implementation time and the need for complex coding of applications. In addition, systems can be added without modifying scripts, and resources can be easily added, too. There are sample policies available for IBM Tivoli System Automation. You can download them from the following Web page ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/sys-auto-linux/.

Automatic recovery

IBM Tivoli System Automation quickly and consistently performs an automatic restart of failed resources or whole applications either in place or on another system of a Linux or an AIX cluster. This process greatly reduces system outages.

Automatic movement of applications

IBM Tivoli System Automation manages the cluster-wide relationships among resources for which it is responsible. If applications need to be moved among nodes, IBM Tivoli System Automation automatically handles the start and stop relationships, node requirements, and any preliminary or follow-up actions. This process again relieves the operator from manual command entry, reducing operator errors.

Resource grouping

Resources can be grouped together in IBM Tivoli System Automation. When they are grouped, all relationships among the members of the group can be established, such as location relationships, start and stop relationships, and so on. After configuration is completed, operations can be performed against the entire group as a single entity. This process once again eliminates the need for operators to remember the application components and relationships, reducing the possibility of errors.

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