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Tivoli Endpoint Manager (BigFix) Unified Management Platform

The IBM Tivoli® Endpoint Manager (TEM)—built on BigFix® technology - Unified Management Platform is the foundation for all of the software modules in the platform. This platform is built up on the concept of having a single agent installed on all target systems that is capable of performing all TEM software functionality.

Take a look at this video, The best of IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager:

More and more today companies are investing in multiple systems management tools to provide key services such as inventory, software distribution, patch management, power management, security configuration & vulnerability management.  This type of investment often results in a set of disparate systems management tools that are un-integrated, have a high total cost of ownership, slow to respond to incidents and ultimately provide a poor return on investment.  Some of the most significant issues, both monetary and performance related associated with this strategy include:

• Increased license costs - license costs associated with each management tool.
• Increased infrastructure costs - separate infrastructure required to run each management tool.
• Increased staff costs - separate teams required to maintain and support each management tool.
• Management tools impact client performance – separate agents for each product can impact the performance of the client.
• Poor visibility and control of distributed enterprises – often a significant number of servers are unmanaged on distributed networks.

The Enterprise Suite addresses these issues by providing real time visibility and control of distributed enterprises through a single unified management platform using a single agent and a unified console.  This platform acts as a solid foundation for an integrated set of software products that provides lifecycle management, endpoint protection, security configuration & vulnerability management.  This intelligent platform can respond rapidly to events in an enterprise, and is designed to continuously discover, assess, remediate and enforce the health and security of servers, desktops, and roaming laptops in real time, via a single policy-driven agent and console. The following diagram shows a simplified view of the TEM infrastructure.

Client Endpoint

This agent is designed specifically not to impact the performance of a target system, using 2-4 megabytes of memory and less than 2 percent of processor bandwidth when active, it is supported on Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS.

Relay Infrastructure

The infrastructure that sits above the agent is highly scalable and can support over 250,000 clients, it consists of a BigFix server and multiple tiers of TEM relays. Due to the nature of today’s distributed enterprises a tiered architecture is essential to handle large software/ patch transfers and DMZ’s. The infrastructure has many configuration options and can be encrypted and throttled to avoid impacting network performance.

Console

The BigFix console gives an enterprise view of all computers on the network along with vulnerabilities and suggested remedies.

Communication

A key feature to note about the unified management platform is that communication between the BigFix Server, Relays and Endpoints all takes place over a single port 52311 (which can be changed), which greatly simplifies the deployment and use of BigFix within complicated firewall zones.

The following diagram shows an example of the architecture that could be deployed to a layered DMZ.

Conclusions

Adopting a unified management platform for performing multiple systems management functions can, not only reduce the complexity of systems management infrastructure and the load systems management tools place on managed clients but also reduces the total cost of running the solution.

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