It’s no secret that moving
to a Cloud environment is the right thing to do for many organizations,
services and applications. And, there are no end of vendors, consultants, SME’s
ready to tell you how great it’s going to be after you’ve made the move. They’ll
even point out the myriad of detailed decisions and choices you’ll have to go
through as you choose a supplier. And, there is plenty of advice and support to
help when choosing this or that supplier.
There has been much less
focus on what happens AFTER purchase. Where’s the help when you’re faced with
maintaining, supporting, monitoring, administering, tracking, provisioning,
de-provisioning, etc., in short operating and managing the Cloud. And, whether
fully public, totally private or a mix, in most cases, significant, pre-existing
infrastructure doesn’t go away and will still be in use.
The problem isn’t simply
managing the new infrastructure. It is monitoring, managing and operating the
total infrastructure to optimize operations to meet organization needs. Inevitably,
a task much more complex and challenging than it appeared during the pre-sales
presentations.
The problem isn’t managing
individual elements; plenty of solutions exist that are able to handle all the
servers, apps, etc. It’s making it all work together in a coherent, integrated
manner. What’s missing is an end-to-end, integrated solution. What’s needed is
a solution that smoothly handles a multi-cloud, heterogeneous, end-to-end
environment. One designed to assure optimal operation across the platforms to assure
that compliance policies are enforced while infrastructure capacities scale up
and down.
BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle
Management 4.5 (CLM) tackles the challenges of integrated infrastructure and
cloud management and compliance. It addresses
the need for integrated management to assure that the enterprise will actually
realize the value that motivated not only the move to the Cloud, but the
purchase of the entire IT infrastructure. Let’s look at this new release.
What sets BMC apart?
Figure 1 Multi-cloud Automation &
Governance
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BMC was a ground-breaking leader in automating
infrastructure management. In keeping with this tradition, they set their
goals for this new release very high. They are delivering “multi-cloud
automation and governance” extending from the corporate datacenter though
Clouds private and public (Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure). (See Figure 1.)
All under the guidance and control of corporate IT while offering all users extensive
access thru self-service portals. CLM has
been designed for environments that include multiple different cloud
implementations to manage and monitor both physical and virtual devices. It
includes monitoring and policy-driven management for reliable, secure compliance
with operational and regulatory rules, comprehensive change management and CMDB
administration.
How is this done?
Cloud
Lifecycle Management 4.5 delivers new functionality in three areas:
- Digital Service Innovation – using BMC’s MyIT provides users direct, easy access to a wide-range of services and service definitions using catalogs. The goal is to provide an exceptional user experience using the latest in technology. With access across all available infrastructure using a consistent, common interface, Service consumption and usage can be tracked and costs monitored for efficient control.
- Trusted Cloud – Analyze and manage your cloud and datacenter operations on easily customizable health monitoring and value tracking dashboards. Only BMC provides fully integrated CMDB and change management support allowing for detailed collection of data on all changes so you can track what is being used, by whom and how frequently, etc. , this facilitates the management of the cost and consumption of services as well as overall operations in the cloud and datacenter environments; easily integrates with Remedy and other ITSM solutions
- Simplified Complexity – one of the strongest aspects in this release is BMC’s focus on simplifying complex tasks, e.g. aiding developers as they adopt container technologies. The Service Blueprint Designer allows definition and creation of a multi-tiered application using a graphical representation to generate a reusable model of the services, resources, and relationships which can be saved, and displayed in a services catalog for reuse.
Summary
BMC has provided an impressive set of new and leading edge
technology to manage Cloud as an integral, integrated piece of heterogeneous
data center and enterprise operations. They focus on putting together solutions
to simplify complex tasks. They aren’t alone in that effort. But, BMC’s
focus is on solving the daily challenges that confront their operations and
development staffs. They want to create
and deliver solutions that accelerate and improve the ability of IT to complete
its tasks, and provide visibility to the ways IT contributes to successful
enterprise operations.
The difference between the
crowd and BMC is that BMC is delivering products that deliver as promised and
appear to be getting better at it every time. Take a look for yourself.