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Data Center Management Simplified BladeLogic Automation Software Can Take Rote Tasks Out Of Your
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“Change,” says Vick Vaishnavi, “is almost second nature in a data center.” He would know. Vaishnavi is director of product marketing for BladeLogic, a leading provider of data automation software that counts some of the nation’s best-known companies as its clients, including Wal-Mart, VeriSign, WeightWatchers, Microsoft, Priceline.com, and TimeWarner. In fact, BladeLogic has the largest number of Global 2000 clients of any vendor in its field. But that doesn’t mean its products are helpful only to big business. In small to midsized firms, automation can be a godsend to overtaxed IT staffs that have to provision, change, and manage hundreds of servers daily but don’t have the time or people to cope with the workload. Automation Salvation Automation can reduce the time it takes for common data center tasks (the kind of rote chores that admins and network engineers often hate to do). According to BladeLogic, for instance, its software can shorten a server audit from 60 minutes to 60 seconds or help you tweak applications on Unix servers in five seconds. Automation also cuts down on human error, making your servers more stable and in turn more secure. In an atmosphere that’s rank with phishing, spam, and every kind of virus attack, that’s not a point to ignore. Servers “have the business data that’s critical to all companies, whether they’re midtier to large,” says Vaishnavi. “They want to protect those servers, and their applications, with their lives.” Brass Tacks The BladeLogic Operations Manager is a suite of tools that helps data center managers provision, configure, and change servers with ease. Whether you’re starting from bare metal or adding software to an existing OS, you can use the BladeLogic Operations Manager to provision a server (Windows, Linux, and Unix alike) based on policies you set in advance. You can also automate some of your most common but time-consuming tasks, such as managing passwords, DNS, and user groups or keeping an eye on license use and collecting logs for later review. If you’re part of a public company, BladeLogic Operations Manager can help you with the growing beast known as Sarbanes-Oxley. You can use the software to inspect servers for compliance problems then reconfigure them based on policies in a change engine, ensuring that all machines satisfy the dictates of Sarbanes-Oxley’s well-known Section 404. Just as important, BladeLogic’s software can help you meet your compliance goals without bursting your budget. Or, as Vaishnavi puts it, “We allow [clients] to meet their compliance benchmarks while executing change as efficiently and as economically as possible.” Changing Change Management Beyond setup and compliance, the BladeLogic Operations Manager can help you reconfigure your data center on the fly to meet the daily needs of your business. All data centers have applications to update or even migrate from server to server as they move from development to user testing to production. And there’s never a dearth of patches, new releases, and other updates to install, test, and troubleshoot. BladeLogic Operations Manager lets you set policies to handle these events and even foresee how they might impact your operations. The software’s transaction control features let you model a change and its effects before you make it or roll it back if you discover an unforeseen problem. The goal, as Vaishnavi says, is not simply to “respond to change as quickly as possible and even as economically as possible.” It’s also to do so “as accurately as possible,” he says. “You’ll use the right server and right apps without sacrificing availability and security and compliance to regulatory standards.” An Imprimatur Those are goals that analysts agree with. Recently Galen Schreck of Forrester Research named BladeLogic as one of the front-runners in the data center automation market, which includes such luminaries as IBM, Veritas, HP, and Sun (none of whom performed as highly on Forrester’s tests). BladeLogic has also received other industry plaudits, most notably when president and CEO Dev Ittycheria was named an Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in conjunction with Microsoft. Ittycheria was formerly named one of technology’s top 25 executives by Computer Reseller News, in a list that had Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Sun’s Scott McNealy, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison in its ranks. Praise like that, not to mention the firm’s growing market share, gives BladeLogic the pole position in the automation race and could make it a front-runner for your data center as well. by David Garrett |
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