Source: BMC Software
Adding to its expanding roster of new, industry-leading Business Service Management solutions, BMC Software today delivered the industry's first data centre optimisation solution that integrates and automates the entire planning-to-implementation lifecycle for data centre consolidation and virtualisation projects, ensuring that each configuration change is executed successfully.
Customers will dramatically improve IT efficiency, reduce risk, and optimise their IT infrastructure resources to support business growth.
Data centres are considered the most expensive real estate in any organisation due to the specialised environment required to house servers – things such as climate control, raised floors and safety mechanisms all contribute to the high price tag. While initial server purchase prices can be as low as $2,000, ongoing operational, maintenance, management, and associated expenses are typically much larger. Costs multiply with each server whether idle or fully utilised. BMC's Data Centre Optimisation solutions slow the physical growth of the data centre, also known as server sprawl, by reducing the number of servers used, thus maximising use of space and minimising the cost of supporting and housing servers.
Successful data centre optimisation requires consolidation of data centre elements and virtualisation capabilities. This enables organisations worldwide to leverage existing hardware, software, and data managed by IT organisations.
BMC customer, RBC Financial Group, uses BMC's Performance Assurance for Servers suite to leverage and support the Capacity Management and Provisioning services for their Unix systems, enabling effective management of their Unix resources as they continuously optimise resource utilisation. BMC Performance Assurance is a core part of the process that drives their server optimisation projects.
BMC's Data Centre Optimisation solutions enable the IT Resource Capacity Planners at RBC Financial Group to identify, report, and manage resource demands and execute capacity resource provisioning processes across the Unix resource pools and throughout their business applications lifecycle. The BMC solution assists with the discovery of workload characteristics and behaviours, determination of what resources those workloads require for implementation and management of the appropriate resources while controlling the change impact and assuring business service levels are maintained.
The IT Resource Capacity Planners at RBC Financial Group actively participated in the field tests for BMC's new Exception Detection solution which aligned well with their goals to improve their analysis processes and service quality with proactive analysis of exceptions at a business service component level.
BMC is the only vendor that delivers complete ITIL-integrated workflows for changes associated with server resource provisioning, allowing data centres to link their availability and capacity management processes with change management for more controlled, effective, and efficient use of data centre resources. In addition, BMC's Data Centre Optimisation solutions deliver a comprehensive set of ITIL-based extensions for virtualisation management and optimisation. BMC Discovery now adds discovery of VMware virtual machines and their configurations and populates these items in the industry-leading BMC Atrium CMDB. BMC Performance Assurance solutions have been extended to provide performance analysis and predictive modelling for consolidating to VMware and other leading platforms.
Fred Johannessen, BMC's vice president and program executive for Data Centre Solutions, said, "Many platform vendors are hyping virtualisation, including server resource provisioning, but most businesses are reluctant to embrace it largely due to the high risk of managing and controlling such complexities. BMC’s pragmatic approach is process oriented, automated, and completely platform-agnostic. As a result, customers feel much more comfortable working with us to address the challenges associated with consolidation, virtualisation and automated resource provisioning."
The range of BMC products making up the Data Centre Optimisation solution include BMC Virtualiser 2.5, BMC Performance Assurance 7.3 (both available now), as well as new workflow integrations with existing BMC solutions such as BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Discovery, BMC Change and Configuration Management, and BMC Performance Manager 2.1.