Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Hybrid Cloud computing with the Cast Iron Appliance.

( Views and opinions are my own, and does not reflect IBM's point of view )
Cast Iron XH40 is an appliance hosting the IBM's application server. This appliance can be used for connecting the On premise Applications like Tivoli and Off Premise agents on the cloud.
This appliance would act as a Gateway between the Cloud on one end , and the On Premise apps on the other.
This model is the Hybrid cloud, where the CastIron Appliance acts as an Interface between the two ends.

For this to happen -some cloud integration is required on the Cast Iron Appliance.
(I will try not to get into the Appliance, but will focus on the Integration here.)


First the definitions:
On Premise Applications : meaning the Tivoli Enterprise Management Server, Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server that are situated behind the firewall in the Company's/Business's infrastructure.

Off Premise : meaning the entities on the Cloud, ( it could be either the Tivoli Network Monitoring Agents on the IBM Cloud, or the Amazon Cloud.)

Appliance : this is the IBM's technology web server on the Cast Iron Appliance, It could be a virtual Appliance, or a real piece of hardware where the WebSphere is installed.

Agents: Tivoli Network Monitoring Agents installed on the Off Premise agents sitting on the servers to collect network monitoring data.

The Hybrid model :
To get the data from the network monitoring agents on the Off Premise (Agents on the cloud), the Cast Iron App has to be configured to get the data from the Off Premise.

Only one agent on the Off premise cloud will be configured to listen to the CastIron appliance.
Other agents on the cloud will point their TEMS (Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server) to the lead server.
The lead server (on Off-Premise)will have firewall enabled to listen to CastIron.

The Cast Iron Appliance will have the Tivoli monitoring agent with capabilities to punch thru the firewall ( configured in gateway.xml) [since the CastIron is sitting behind the firewall ] and get across to the Off-Premise agent on the lead server and collect the data.

The integration is the GUI Interface that the user will configure pointing the source (i.e the TEMS ) and the destination (i.e the lead server on the Off Premise ) which is a simple operation where the user selects the default ports to communicate to and activates the Tivoli Monitoring Agent on the Cast Iron.

This interface is a WebSphere plugin that the user has to install in order to collect server network monitoring.

Once the CastIron Appliance gets the data with the help of the Monitoring agent running on it, it will send it to the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server and which in turn will feed to the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server thereby rendering the Network Data on the Portal.

This completes the integration with no coding !

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