Cisco turns to BMC for app stack controls
Published:17-March-2009
By Kevin White
Will manage UCS-based business services
BMC Software Inc has said the inclusion of its business service management software into Cisco’s Unified Computing System promises to completely change the maths of what its costs to manage and administer IT infrastructure.
Embedded in the UCS (see our early story) is a purpose-built BMC Software management system “that will allow data centre administrators to dynamically provision and reconfigure the entire stack of business services, and the underlying physical and virtual resources all from a single console,” company chief Bob Beauchamp said.
In many data centres, such tasks still rely on manual interventions and sometimes can take weeks or even months to accomplish.
Cisco has confirmed that it plans to link its UCS next generation data centre platform with certain elements of BMC’s business service management suite, to provide the management segment needed to control dynamic, virtual IT environments.
This will include BMC’s BladeLogic data centre automation software and the Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
Cisco reportedly talked to other service automation players, but turned to BMC because of its data centre automation know-how and its systems agnosticism. HP is the other player with a strong offering in this market segment.
“Our software is considered the best there is at solving the high level management problems of provisioning and controlling application services, but the critical piece is BladeLogic” Jim Grant, BMC's senior vice president for strategy and corporate development, told us.
BMC bought BladeLogic in an $800 million deal a year ago for its data centre automation software.
The operations management software will manage the entire lifecycle of servers and applications from inventory, provisioning, configuration and change control to overseeing compliance reporting, while Atrium can be set up to provide real-time insight on the business impact of service fluctuations.
Grant said that Cisco would provide UCS to suit any customer need, but that the UCS, BladeLogic and Atrium combination would be “ready to go” once the Unified Computing System becomes generally available to customers starting in the second calendar quarter of 2009.
He added that Atrium also includes the run book automation technology that provides the pre-built workflows that are needed to support system and network operational processes.
This BMC Atrium Orchestrator ties together the specialised components of ITIL processes for service management, problem management and service automation, and stems from the RealOps acquisition of a couple of years ago.
