IBM Starts To Think Dynamically

Earlier this year, IBM acquired Think Dynamics to gain technology that will be at the heart of its E-business On Demand strategy.

"I think (automatically provisioning applications across multiple servers) ) is a great idea, "said Mont Phelps, CEO of Tivoli partner Netivity Solutions, Waltham, Mass. "It's always been a difficult, time consuming and costly process. To be able to do it quickly, effectively and accurately will be a huge advantage."

The Think Dynamics technology, which will be tentatively called Think Dynamics Tivoli Orchestrator and Think Dynamics Tivoli Provisioner, will be formally launched as an IBM product at the Gartner Symposium ITexpo conference next month, said Robert LeBlanc, General Manager for Tivoli Software in the IBM Software Group.

IBM has already used the technology in the U.S. Open Web site, said LeBlanc. During the event, IBM automatically diverted server resources from a protein folding application to support spikes in Web traffic on the U.S. Open site that IBM was running as a sponsor of the event.

"We reallocated servers performing protein folding to web serving automatically," said LeBlanc. "If the load went up, we moved the server over. When it went down we moved it back to protein folding."

Christina Torode contributed to this story