Quoting from the BMC Software official announcement:
BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE: BMC], a leading provider of enterprise management solutions, today announced its Service Oriented Resource Management (SORM) solutions, including the new BMC® Virtualizer Suite and the latest version of BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers. The SORM solutions also include both current and planned integration with other BMC products enabling holistic management of IT processes, from the mainframe, through distributed systems, and into a virtualized environment. BMC Software’s SORM solutions provide customers with a predictive and adaptable computing environment that automatically provisions new server and software resources, based on real-time business requirements. With SORM, businesses gain control over the latest virtualization technologies and industry standard servers to reduce infrastructure costs, increase service availability, and respond in real-time to changing business requirements.
Introductions today include:
- BMC Virtualizer Suite, a new software family that automatically orchestrates the provisioning of resources on-demand. It includes BMC Virtualizer for High Availability and BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand;
- Enhancements to BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers, making it the first comprehensive predictive modeling technology for virtualized server environments;
- BMC Virtualizer integration with existing BMC Performance Manager and BMC Performance Assurance solutions; and
- BMC Virtualizer integration with BMC Configuration Management and Discovery products to ensure resources are synchronized with appropriate software updates and with change management processes.
“St. George Bank saw significant cost savings using BMC’s Performance Assurance solutions to predictively model performance, capacity and consolidation opportunities presented during business mergers,” said Michelle Ruel, senior capacity planner, St.George Bank, Australia. “We were naturally excited to hear BMC would be extending predictive capabilities to Virtual Servers, and asked to participate in development and testing. Based on our experience there, we look forward to leveraging equivalent value as we adopt these technologies.”
“Making sure our freight arrives at its destination on time is one of our most critical business services,” said Tim Hill, distributed systems capacity planner at CNF, a $3.7 billion company that is a leading provider of global supply chain solutions for a wide range of manufacturing, industrial, retail, and government customers. “We rely on the performance analytics and the predictive capabilities of BMC Performance Assurance to increase our utilization rates, save money, and eliminate potential performance and capacity risks for our critical business services. As we are now adopting VMware to virtualize portions of our server infrastructure, we are excited that BMC will be able to provide these same benefits with BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers.”
SORM Solutions Advance Business Service Management Strategy
BMC Software’s Business Service Management (BSM) strategy enables companies to move beyond traditional IT management to better optimize and manage their critical services from a business perspective. By applying business relevance in automating resource management, companies can ensure the most critical business systems are addressed first. The company’s SORM solutions also provide the management capabilities needed to successfully adopt today’s industry standard hardware and virtualization technologies in a utility computing model. BMC’s SORM solutions don’t lock customers into a specific implementation framework, so customers can start with any product, such as BMC Virtualizer, based on their immediate needs and then incorporate other SORM offerings as they go.BMC Virtualizer Suite allows companies to consolidate and cost-optimize their datacenters and significantly improve application service availability. BMC Virtualizer solutions provide policy-based resource orchestration and provisioning capabilities across enterprise clusters and standalone application servers. Unlike other failover automation products that require one dedicated backup server per production server or cluster, BMC Virtualizer automatically provisions appropriate server resources – whether physical or virtual – for applications based on business need and enables the sharing of the server resources across multiple applications. The shared pools of server resources can be used for both failover and/or providing capacity on-demand. The first products in this family, BMC Virtualizer for High Availability and BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand, are available immediately.
BMC Virtualizer for High Availability eliminates 1:1 server failover requirements by managing a smaller pool of shared failover servers. This automates application server failover and recovery in less than five minutes. BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand includes the functionality of the High Availability product and also allows organizations with server clusters, such as Oracle 10g, Apache, and Microsoft IIS, to improve service availability and performance through datacenter virtualization and the automated provisioning of applications, servers, networks, and storage.
“SORM enables customers to leverage the latest virtualization and industry standard hardware architectures to realize the quickest possible business agility, at the lowest possible price, while mitigating the risks associated with adopting these technologies,” said Mary Smars, vice president and general manager, Distributed Systems Management, BMC Software. “The combination of BMC Performance Assurance, BMC Performance Manager and BMC Service Management solutions allows customers to dynamically provision from a business perspective. Our goal is to reduce business risk and help our customers achieve Business Service Management.”
BMC Software is also working with several partners including Microsoft to bring its SORM strategy to market. “Microsoft and BMC share a common goal to help customers achieve the promise of self-managing dynamic systems, and BMC’s Service Oriented Resource Management solutions, along with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, help customers begin to achieve that promise,” said Zane Adam, director of marketing, Windows Server Division, Microsoft Corp.
BMC Software’s Performance Assurance® solutions provide comprehensive performance analysis and prediction capabilities required to optimize resource acquisition and deployment decisions. BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers includes new predictive capability that shows how key applications will perform during and after transition from physical to virtualized environments. Once the planning and implementation is complete, the solution helps ensure the ongoing optimized performance of Virtual Server environments such as VMware, Microsoft and XEN.
By using BMC Performance Assurance solutions and BMC Virtualizer, provisioning policies can be created and used to automatically deploy exactly the right capacity, just before it is required. This automatic provisioning minimizes the need to purchase and install new computing resources to handle peak loads; it allows customers to pay only for the capacity needed. Through BMC Software’s exclusive methodology, customers also can test resource requirements and deployment scenarios before implementation. Coupled with BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers, a solution that discovers all virtual machines and maps those virtual machines to their associated VMware ESX/GSX servers and or VMware Groups, a complete lifecycle performance monitoring, management and optimization solution is realized.
BMC Software’s Configuration Management and IT Discovery – Key Industry Differentiators for Managing Virtual Environments
Using processes orchestrated from BMC Virtualizer, BMC Software Configuration Management (formerly Marimba Server Management from BMC Software) and BMC Software IT Discovery solutions detect, provision and manage specific server configurations. BMC Topology Discovery discovers virtualized environments and records them in the BMC Atrium CMDB (Configuration Management Database) while BMC Software Configuration Management solutions provide automated, closed loop configuration management of those environments and the servers on which they reside. The BMC Atrium CMDB provides an open, common data repository, shared service model, and unified user and reporting interfaces to accelerate attainment of BSM. Virtualized environments change frequently, necessitating the use of “virtual environment aware” configuration management and discovery tools to provide up-to-date configuration information to the CMDB and ensuring that all service management activities are executed based on the most recent configuration information.For more information including additional customer success stories with BMC Virtualizer and other BMC Service Oriented Resource Management solutions, see: http://www.bmc.com/capacitymanagement.