Dell AIM Helps Reduce Report Bursting

While report bursting — also known as data-driven publication — in enterprise resource planning (ERP) offers substantial advantages, it also requires strategic resource management to reap all benefits. Complex, multitiered applications with Web, app and database layers tend to create capacity demand spikes, stressing infrastructure components. Scheduling bursts and overprovisioning are not enough to solve the problem. Companies need a flexible and dynamic infrastructure that devotes resources to ERP report bursting on an as-needed basis, so users can leverage business data wherever and whenever the opportunity arises.

Reduce report bursting by simplifying the process of changing resource allocations dynamically across the entire data center. Dell™ Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) — one of the three key components of the Dell Virtual Integrated Systems (VIS) suite — is a single management point for virtual and physical resources that enables managing workloads from a data center-wide perspective. Dell AIM offers flexibility, speed and accuracy in retargeting allocations, while also tending to the needs of other business users, by delivering:

• Workload mobility, which is key to managing ERP report bursts and other applications that peak and wane in usage, by running applications as virtual systems, shifting them to physical systems to meet peak demand, and shifting them back again to virtual when demand ebbs
• Rapid deployment, which lets companies meet peak demands and react to changes in business requirements easily
• Overprovisioning prevention, by using a unified pool of resources with automated, rapid deployments and the ability to scale up or down easily
• True automation, through scripting
• Revenue protection, by virtue of the containment of licensing costs — an expense that tends to spike unnecessarily in improperly managed report burst environments
• Accelerated virtualization adoption, enabling companies to add more cost-effective virtual machines when and as needed
• Heterogeneous hardware and software support, which leverages AIM’s capability to support multihypervisor environments, to manage a heterogeneous server, blade chassis, storage and network environment