Integrated Systems Management
Job Management Partner 1 : Introduction of Integrated Systems Management "JP1 Version 9" designed to support overall optimization of IT investment in the age of cloud computing,assisting in company-wide system consolidation and ensuring overall optimized operation as seen from a business viewpoint.

On June 3rd this year, Hitachi, Ltd. (led by Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Takashi Kawamura, hereinafter referred to as "Hitachi") will begin to sell "JP1 Version 9," Integrated Systems Management, which is a completely renewed version of the JP1 job management product suite. JP1 Version 9 contains a lineup of new products that are enhanced with virtual environment monitoring capabilities to help further advance their company-wide system consolidation in order to optimize their IT investment.

• JP1 Version 9 provides overall system operation optimization as seen from a business viewpoint, based on the new operation concept that both effective use of IT resources and office operation efficiency improvement should be made a reality.
• Recently, businesses have begun making efforts towards optimizing their IT investment by making use of cloud computing and advancing company-wide system consolidation in order to reduce costs and improve office operation efficiency. However, due to the pursuit of effective use of IT resources, they are challenged by increasingly complicated management tasks which are caused by vast changes in the style of operation using virtualization technology and by increasing operation workload burden resulting from an ever increasing system size.
• JP1 Version 9 enables customers to learn accurate IT resource usage conditions prior to and subsequent to server consolidation without having to tamper with currently active business servers through the use of its new agentless monitoring function. In addition, since it can automatically obtain configuration information on physical servers and virtual machines from virtualization software, it helps reduce construction workloads in large virtual environments. Furthermore, in a highly consolidated environment in which tasks are performed automatically, JP1 Version 9 can display the progress of each task on a real time basis, predict when a task will finish, and use such progress and prediction information when handling individual tasks based on their priorities. In this way, IT resources can be effectively used without lowering business service levels.
• Taking advantage of the past performance and in depth knowledge of JP1, which has led the automatic operation management product market in Japan for many years, Hitachi helps businesses in their efforts towards optimizing their IT investment by maintaining and improving business service levels while making the best use of IT resources in systems that are consolidated at a company-wide level.

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Principal features of JP1 Version 9

JP1 Version 9 contains various enhanced functions based on the Flexible & Smart concept in order to achieve operation management that serves two purposes namely making effective use of IT resources and improving the efficiency of operation tasks.

(1) Simple and accurate resource monitoring through a server monitoring method that includes an agentless monitoring technique

• The most important element for the effective use of IT resources is accurate information on the current IT resource usage condition. JP1 Version 9 includes JP1/Performance Management - Remote Monitor, which is a new product that not only provides a conventional function for monitoring using agents, but also provides a monitoring function without the use of agents.
• This agentless monitoring function removes the need for adding agents to active business servers to ensure that customers can accurately understand overall resource conditions when researching the difference between conditions prior to and subsequent to server consolidation, or when monitoring in a large virtual or similar environment. In addition, this product is the first among principal operation management products to provide an agentless monitoring function that is as easy to use as conventional agent-based monitoring functions. As a result, when these functions are used for monitoring in different situations, there is no need to learn new operating procedures.

(2) Reduction in operation workloads in large virtual environments thanks to linkage with virtualization software

• JP1/Integrated Management, an integrated management product, can automatically acquire physical server and virtual machine configuration information from virtualization software. This makes it possible to manage physical/virtual server configuration in virtual environments and specify configuration on monitoring screens quickly and simply, thus allowing operation workloads in a large virtual environment to be reduced. In addition, enhancement will be carried out this year on the function that is used to automatically perform, on a real-time basis, processes encompassing the range from detection of physical/virtual server configuration changes to the reflection of latest configuration information on the monitoring screens. This enhanced function will help customers respond to dynamic virtual server changes that are predicted to take place more frequently in the future.

(3) Renewal of job management products for the purpose of further improving the operating efficiency of large systems

• JP1/Automatic Job Management System 3, a completely renewed new job management product, provides monitoring screens, each of which is suitable for specific system administrator roles. For example, data center administrators can concentrate on infrastructure management over the entire system, whereas job administrators at each site can perform procedures for adding or changing jobs and job steps. This ensures that the system can run in correspondence to actual work assignments. In addition, the switching operation performed when a job is added or changed is automated so that jobs can be changed without having to suspend the current service.
• Furthermore, job end times are now predictable. Therefore, in the case of high priority jobs for example, selected jobs can be reassigned to servers with higher resource availability to ensure that jobs assigned higher priorities can be completed as scheduled.
• Another advantage is the concurrent handling of multiple job scheduling processes. This has provided approximately a tenfold increase in job activation performance when compared with the conventional method. For the system that is expected to increase in size in the future, JP1 Version 9 will ensure improved performance and reliability of automatic job operations.
• JP1 Version 9 also contains various enhanced or improved functions that help optimize IT operation, including those provided by network management products that can quickly identify root causes when a fault occurs in increasingly complicated networked environments.

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JP1 webpage

http://www.hitachi.co.jp/jp1/

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Shipment times may vary depending on the platform.

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