mValent Eases Application Configuration Headaches

Managing myriad application configuration changes in large-scale, multi-tiered application environments can be a nightmare when done manually or with homegrown scripts.

Application configuration management provider mValent on Jan. 22 sought to address that complexity with the latest release of Integrity, the company's automated application provisioning tool.

Integrity v5 can automatically provision configuration settings for multiple application servers in multiple locations, making it possible to speed up the roll out new applications or upgrades compared to manual efforts. 

“Integrity v5 can simultaneously provision configuration files or application setting changes for hundreds or even thousands of servers,” said Jim Hickey, chief marketing officer for the Waltham, Mass., company.

The new release with its multi-server provisioning capability is aimed at mission critical applications that run across a number of servers and are accessed by a large number of users. It helps to insure continual uptime for those applications.

“Multiserver provisioning is about mission-critical applications that can’t go down, be taken offline for maintenance and need to have servers in sync at all times,” he said.

Integrity competes with BladeLogic and to some extent with IBM and its Tivoli Provisioning Manager. It is resold by the former Opsware, now part of Hewlett Packard Company, as a complement to Opsware’s broader server provisioning products.

“We do more surgical, fine-level change. We focus on the application infrastructure components and support configuration and change management for configuration properties for the database, operating system, middleware, Web and application servers. [Opsware] moves large software images around to servers, and track versions, patch levels and do patch distributions.  They don’t touch configuration settings,” claimed Hickey.

Integrity v5 also allows reports to be created and distributed that address the compliance concerns of IT executives.  New report templates can be created, scheduled and sent to an e-mail distribution list. “Now senior management can see how much change is in compliance, what percentage of changes are out of compliance with a change management process and which applications are more inline with a change management process,” said Hickey.

To allow customers to more easily integrate Integrity with their troubleticketing systems or CMDBs (configuration management databases), mValent added a new Java-based API.

The new release is available now.