BMC Updates Cloud Management Platform

BMC has upgraded its cloud system management package, which the IT management software provider says includes new and more granular administrative controls and capabilities.

Specifically, BMC has updated its Cloud Lifecycle Management to v3.0 and BMC Cloud Operations Management to v9.0. The company says the products give cloud service providers greater latitude in planning, building and running a cloud system.

Cloud Lifecycle Management 3.0 is a cloud-building tool that enables service providers to offer a broader set of services through the cloud, Lilac Schoenbeck, Senior Manager of Solutions Marketing in BMC’s Cloud Computing group, told eWEEK. This also includes legacy applications.

Virtual Machines

“We’re now enabling SaaS (software-as-a-service) provisioning through this interface, as well as legacy services, including IBM LPARs,” Schoenbeck said. An LPAR is IBM’s early-stage virtualisation platform that pre-dates Intel x86-based servers, Schoenbeck said.

LPAR is the forerunner of a virtual machine. It is an acronym for logical partitioning, a system of taking a computer’s total resources – processors, memory and storage – and splitting them into smaller units that each can be run with its own instance of the operating system and applications.

Logical partitioning, which requires specialised hardware circuits, is typically used to separate different functions of a system, such as Web serving, database functions, client/server actions or systems that serve multiple time zones and/or languages. Since the partitions in effect act as separate physical machines, they can communicate with each other. IBM was the first to use logical partitioning in 1976.

“Enterprises often don’t decommission a lot of these older platforms, even though we may think of them as historical,” Schoenbeck said. “What they (users) want to do is to offer services consistently through the same management platform. What they don’t want are new silos to deal with, and the cloud very much has the potential to create a new silo in the data centre.”

Product Features

BMC is doing this by “extending the cloud management platform across the broadest set of services, and architecting it to meet the broadest set of user needs,” Schoenbeck said.

Cloud Lifecycle Management provides, the following, according to Schoenbeck:

• configurable cloud services from a service catalog and self-service portal;
• provisioning of fully configured services, not just individual VMs;
• tight, efficient administrative control;
• intelligent, policy-driven placement and optimisation;
• broad resource support for physical and virtual, private and public cloud.

BMC Cloud Operations Management 9.0 provides improved self-service provisioning of cloud services to service providers, Schoenbeck said.

A unique feature of BMC’s approach is its network container functionality, which creates isolated and secure virtualised network zones within the cloud – not unlike what the old LPARs provided. Network containers separate cloud services from each other to enable co-mingled, multi-tenant environments.

BMC said Cloud Operations Management 9.0 provides:

• better prediction of capacity needs, identification of potential issues resulting from change, and faster  resolution if and when issues do arise;
• identification, prioritisation, and isolation of issues across the full spectrum of cloud services and shared local and remote resources;
• analytics-based workflows to increase operational efficiency, minimise human error, and reduce cost per cloud service.

The Houston-based company also announced 25 July that it has created a “chart and compass” feature that helps users map and navigate the end user experience when working inside a cloud system.

BMC End User Experience Management diagnoses and improves online customer satisfaction rates, BMC said. In the latest release of this tool, BMC has augmented it to include applications running in the cloud, with administrative visibility from the end user all the way down to the code, the company said.

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