BMC Software announced it is offering its Business Service Management (BSM) set of services and solutions to facilitate "private cloud" development, and that it is leveraging Amazon Web Services to optimize hybrid IT infrastructure deployments via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
A number of enterprises are already using BMC's BSM platform to realize the benefits of the cloud using the tools, technologies, and processes in place in their current environments. "BMC's existing and integrated Business Service Management offering allows customers to build, provision and manage internal, private cloud infrastructures using the same proven processes and policies that govern physical and virtual resources," Megan Stabler, principal of strategic marketing for BMC Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "BSM has proven itself with customers to be the most effective way to manage a data center, regardless of the physical or virtual infrastructure inside. We've taken an approach where customers can start with virtualization, gradually increase the level of automation and then eventually move to cloud environments using the same products and interfaces. This means that there is no need to acquire a new, cloud-specific set of tools, which require additional training and introduce a new level of complexity."
As a result, BMC is moving the BSM infrastructure it has been offering for a number of years into more of a "cloud" context. The vendor is working with IT organizations and service providers to bring the same level of service management capabilities, automation and control expected from their physical and virtual environments to their cloud initiatives.
The core capabilities found in BSM-including service automation, service support, service assurance, service optimization, and the Atrium platform-can be used to establish private clouds as the next generation of automated and virtualized data centers, Stabler says. "Private Clouds represent the next generation of data center architectures, which build upon a variety of IT principles such as virtualization, automation and grid computing," Stabler says. "They are unique in that they allow users to reuse resources, automate the orchestration of resource provisioning and deprovisioning and perform granular reporting of services. For the past 18 months, we have been working with many of our customers who are either already establishing these environments or are currently planning to do so."
Capabilities provided through BMC include the ability to establish a "service catalog" for internal and external IT services, associated service-level agreements and costs; set and manage tiered service levels for a diverse cloud customer set; provide self-service request and fulfillment of cloud resources and services to users; automate the orchestration, provisioning, service changes, monitoring and management of cloud resources; automate workload management, including real-time provisioning of virtual machines; accurately forecast and track the cost of delivering services in the cloud; and maintain a "single source of truth" in a configuration management database (CMDB).
In a related announcement, BMC said it is leveraging Amazon Web Services to optimize hybrid IT infrastructure deployments via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Working with BMC, IT organizations will be able to extend their internal data centers to Amazon EC2 via a unified, integrated BSM management solution. Enterprise customers can request computing resources- either internal (physical or virtual) or external from Amazon EC2-through an integrated self-service portal. Those requests are tracked through BMC's ITIL-compliant change management system and automatically provisioned and configured in minutes. This self-service interface also supports service de-provisioning and service change requests.
Asset association and tracking of Amazon EC2 resources are integrated with BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database, and configuration compliance is enforced. The integrated solution supports both pre-existing Amazon Machine Images as well as dynamic AMI creation. BMC enables customers to holistically manage physical, virtual and cloud environments, further reducing cost and complexity through an integrated and unified set of management solutions.
For more information about BMC's cloud computing offerings, visit here.