BladeLogic Looks to Unify the Data Center

BladeLogic is looking to bring greater integration of management software in the data center.

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Oct. 9 in Orlando, Fla., the company is unveiling its BladeLogic Orchestration Manager, which is designed to work as the bond that ties the disparate software products from different vendors that many customers run in their data centers. It also offers integration of those products with BladeLogics suite of data center automation offerings.

"Customers would like to use the best-of-breed products, but they want them to be integrated," said Vick Viren Vaishnavi, director of marketing at BladeLogic. "They dont want to be in the business of gluing it together."

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Businesses currently have two choices when it comes to products for such tasks as configuration management and release management: getting all the software from a single vendor, which means not getting the performance they might want; or bringing in products from multiple vendors, which means they lose the benefits of integration, he said.

In addition, many of the tools they use now to integrate these processes, such as runbooks, are done by hand and lack the automation needed in a flexible environment, Vaishnavi said.

With Orchestration Manager, customers get a host of out-of-the-box adapters that enable them to integrate such management systems as service desks, service monitoring and enterprise consoles for incident, problem and change management processors.

There also are adapters for asset management systems and configuration management databases, to integrate CMDBs at an enterprise level, and network configuration management systems to integrate configuration change and compliance across networks, servers and applications.

In addition, BladeLogic, in Lexington, Mass., is providing a software development kit with Orchestration Manager, which gives users the ability to build adapters for processes that arent addressed with the out-of-the-box offerings.

Orchestration Manager is available immediately.

In addition, BladeLogic on Oct. 10 will announce a partnership with Austin, Texas-based AlterPoint, a network configuration vendor, to use Orchestration Manager with its offerings, Vaishnavi said.

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