BladeLogic Tops Data Center Automation Product List

By Joe McKendrick
June 6, 2005

Data center automation (DCA) is gaining traction, with a number of vendors offering tools and services to this nascent market. Recently, Forrester Research issued a report that ranked the market leaders, which includes BladeLogic, BMC, HP, IBM, Opsware, Sun and VERITAS. "Data center automation products have grown from simple provisioning tools to general-purpose platforms for configuration management and automation of IT operations," according to Forrester. "Increasing product complexity has made finding a good fit for your specific environment more difficult."

Vick Viren Vaishnavi, director of product marketing for BladeLogic, provided 5 Minute Briefing insights on the most critical aspects data center managers need to be aware of when looking at DCA solutions. For starters, he said, the critical area that DCA should focus on is the server layer. "There are four major components in a data center," he explained. This includes an application layer, the server infrastructure tier, the network or "plumbing" layer, and the storage layer. "The place where I need to be responsive, spend most of my IT labor dollars, and get my feet held to the fire is on the quality of the service, or application uptime."

Forrester observed that there are two competing camps for DCA. One, which includes BladeLogic, emphasizes lifecycle management, which covers "detailed configuration management, asset management, and integration with other IT management apps. These specialists focus on deep management capabilities that address problematic IT issues like eliminating manual tasks and identifying configuration problems." The second category of products, utility computing, emphasized by vendors such as IBM, "prioritizes development of general-purpose automation engines, virtualization technologies, and heuristic algorithms for making workload management decisions."

Configuration management is critical to any DCA effort, Vaishnavi believes. "You are, invariably in a data center, going to see a lot of changes introduced by virtue of the fact that business requirements change on a regular basis, a high frequency of changes being required in terms of configuration," he said. Making changes to business processes "changes demand on the data center in terms of how I want certain applications to be adjusted, reconfigured and redeployed over new servers to balance that demand," he said. "The discipline of meeting this demand by optimizing your responsiveness is the discipline of configuration management."

The main steps in configuration management is provisioning, change management, followed by administration, Vaishnavi said. But, "it's not enough to say that I can achieve automation by doing these things; what if I'm doing the wrong things? I have automation, so I could potentially become very good at doing the wrong things very quickly." BladeLogic's approach says you cannot separate compliance assurance from configuration management, Vaishnavi said. "They're not mutually exclusive." He emphasized, "I need to have automation in the discipline of auditing, and be able to detect any drift from compliance."