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BMC Gets Into Automation(Information Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Tapping its recent RealOps acquisition, BMC Software is trying to help companies reduce downtime in the data center caused by operator error, upgrades that don't work, and incompatible software combinations. It's a new field for BMC and its flagship Patrol systems management application. BMC's July deal for RealOps added the ability to automate best practices, such as how to restart a stalled server and how to provision new servers. The product introduced last week, Service Automation, lets it compete with the likes of CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. If demand for a service spikes, Service Automation is supposed to see which devices and software the service is based on and govern configuration of, for example, additional servers and network devices, standardizing settings to best practices based on the IT Infrastructure Library. This approach is sometimes called run book automation. Or if a data center has 4,000 Windows servers and an important security patch is announced, Service Automation can help determine "which are the most important ones to patch first," says Herb VanHook, VP of corporate strategy, and "what business users are affected if this server fails." It would also help determine under what conditions, such as peak usage, systems shouldn't be patched. http://informationweek.com/ Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC |