Opsware (NASDAQ: OPSW), the leading provider of Data Centre Automation software, today announced the Opsware ITIL Acceleration Solution, the industry’s first closed-loop Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) automation solution.
By combining the action to implement and enforce ITIL processes with the ability to create a single system of record for rapid reconciliation of those processes, the Opsware solution greatly accelerates the process of standardising on ITIL best practices, which to-date has been a complex and lengthy undertaking for most IT organisations.
Implementing ITIL can be a huge undertaking. It involves changing existing processes, establishing a means to enforce them consistently, and populating a configuration management data base (CMDB) with extensive information about all data centre assets (servers, networks, and storage). It can be challenging for large IT organisations to answer the key questions, "where do I start the project," "how do I implement the ITIL best practices," and "how can I leverage my existing infrastructure investments." The Opsware solution helps companies answer these questions quickly.
Opsware's approach is a major enhancement over traditional asset management or ticketing and monitoring ITIL products, which are confined to addressing customer requirements from either the data side or the process side of managing systems information. Rather than isolating the two, Opsware has integrated the data and process requirements into one single solution through its fully integrated ITIL Acceleration Solution, which includes Opsware's Visual Application Manager, OMDB, and process automation solution. By coordinating discovery and visualisation, information management, and process management capabilities, Opsware helps customers understand and track the operational activities as well as the relationships and configurations of components in the data centre.
"Making today's data centre ITIL compliant is no easy task. Heterogeneous systems, ad hoc processes and constant change make it impossible to achieve the required insight and control through traditional tools," said Tim Howes, CTO at Opsware Inc. "The Opsware Automation System provides an automatedd foundation of insight and control across servers, networks, and later this year, storage. Our new ITIL Acceleration Solution leverages this foundation to combine data, process and change automation, giving customers a giant leg up on achieving ITIL compliance."
The First Comprehensive ITIL Solution
The Opsware ITIL Acceleration Solution includes Opsware's new Operational Management Database (OMDB) and process automation solution with Opsware's Visual Application Manager, all fully integrated together.
This solution prepares customers to meet the challenges of ITIL by delivering the information to accurately understand their environment, and the ability to plan, execute and react based on that information. Among the key capabilities:
- Discovery and visualisation: Discovers applications, servers, network devices, and virtual machines' configurations and inter-dependencies to provide top-down visualisation of business services and its supporting infrastructure
- Integrated process automation: Coordinates across IT groups and systems to provide out-of-the-box workflow automation for ITIL incident, problem, change and release management processes.
- Reporting: Provides out-of-the-box infrastructure, compliance and ITIL reports; also enables customers to create custom ad-hoc, scheduled and historical reports to correlate IT process metrics with underlying infrastructure changes.
- Enterprise Grade: Built on the proven, large-scale, multi-data centre Opsware platform with role-based access control on dynamic, attribute-level security boundaries
- Integration and Federation: Open Interfaces (WS-API, SQL based JDBC) to quickly integrate legacy data sources and applications with federation and reconciliation; out-of-the-box integration to 3rd party applications (e.g., BMC Atrium)
Availability
The Opsware ITIL Acceleration Solution including the Opsware Visual Application Manager, Operational Management Database, and process automation solution is available now.