BMC Boosts Proactive Systems ManagementBMC Boosts Proactive Systems Management

BMC Software, maker of the BMC Patrol systems management application, has announced enhancements to several BMC products to improve IT's "proactive" management of the enterprise software infrastructure.

BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp said in making the announcement Tuesday that the Houston, Texas-based firm is "taking lessons learned from working with our customers and expanding" the capabilities of its product line to meet data center needs. He said BMC was calling its overall approach "dynamic business service management."

The latest release of ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC's operations management software which establishes a baseline for normal application behavior, spots potential problems as they develop and pinpoints a probable cause, has been enhanced.

It has been integrated with BMC BladeLogic Server Automation suite, which allows analytics to be applied to configuration changes to help identify and isolate a human change error, a common cause of business application outages.

ProactiveNet Performance Management has been given intelligent application diagnostics for real-time problem isolation down to the Java Enterprise Edition source code level. The product has also been given analytics for application monitoring in virtualized environments. The product can track interactions between software service components, giving it predictive analytics in real time there as well.

BMC has also upgraded Event and Impact Management, a product that allows IT managers to identify business process events that are crucial to the business and automate responses to them if they appear headed toward slowdown or failure. The enhanced version, available immediately, has been given an operations console that maintains a view of key events and can be used to trigger automated workflow responses to keep them running. One of the features of the Event and Impact Management product, Predictive Root Cause Analysis, has been expanded to recognize additional operational problems that require analysis and responses.

Event and Impact Management has been given pre-packaged automated workflows that invoke incident handling based on operational intelligence and automated corrective responses.

The BladeLogic Server Automation suite has been extended to cover virtual platforms offered by VMware, Microsoft, IBM and Sun Solaris. It includes life cycle management of virtual machines, including creation, modification and deletion. It can also discover virtual machines, including those stored offline and those that have been created and orphaned without management or users.

BladeLogic Server Automation now allows changes to be executed from a central console across software servers, networks, operating systems, hypervisors and application components. In another product, BladeLogic Client Automation, end users may be protected via automated updates from McAfee. End users may self-service through BMC Service Request Management. The client automation product also supports U.S. Federal Desktop Core Configuration compliance to ensure the client meets federal desktop security requirements.

BladeLogic Network Automation now includes single sign-on capability to network devices with session capture for establishing an audit trail. The product has been integrated with BMC Remedy IT Service Management to allow change reconciliation through "one-click" change documentation. It also allows automated network configuration to support the provisioning of physical and virtual servers.

The BMC Atrium Suite includes enhancements to it's application discovery and dependency mapping feature, including a larger library of approved application configuration patterns, said BMC's Paul Avenant, VP of products. "As complexity in the data center increases, so does the demand from customers for a holistic management approach" to prevent outages, he added.

The announcement cited Jerry Gregg, service model administrator at Carfax, as saying the BMC system management products allow his firm to make several changes a day to the company Web site without incurring an outage that would cost "tens of thousands of dollars" of lost revenue.