BMC Software Comes Out with Its Own Cloud-Building Tool Kit

Data center management software provider BMC Software, an original partner of Cisco Systems in the Unified Computing System initiative launched in 2009, has come out with its own cloud computing management package for large enterprises.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, introduced on May 25, is designed to enable enterprises to make the most of their cloud computing hardware and software and to increase efficiency so they can provide bottom-line and green-IT benefits.

In the original UCS partnership scheme, BMC provided the provisioning, change management and configuration software in the stack. Cisco, of course, provided the networking and a new central server.

EMC and NetApp provided the storage capacity, VMware and Microsoft added their virtualization layers-depending upon the choice of the customer-and Accenture shaped the individual product deployments for customers.

Since then, UCS has added vBlocks, smaller modules of some of the aforementioned components, which can be integrated on a smaller scale and are not as daunting as a full-blown forklift overhaul to existing midrange and enterprise IT systems. vBlocks, too, include BMC middleware.

During all this iteration, BMC has been taking copious notes and has come up with its own new cloud-computing layer, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, which works with just about all data center-system-maker components, not just the UCS.

The new cloud management package has been endorsed by Fujitsu, Dell, Red Hat and a few other non-UCS companies.

"This is a completely new product featuring a user self-service portal that people expect in private or public cloud environments," Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy in the office of the CTO at BMC Software, told eWEEK. "They use it to request permission for cloud services, whether internal or external, and the control of services-their status, et cetera.

"It's a bunch of out-of-the-box workflows to basically address one of the common use cases around setting up private or public clouds, and it's also a lot of function extensions to existing products."

Other new features in the Cloud Lifecycle Management package, according to BMC, include "a policy-driven service catalog, which personalizes the list of available service offerings and customizations, based on a user's role ... dynamic provisioning of the entire service stack-compute, network, storage and application-across heterogeneous infrastructures ... [and] prebuilt ITSM integration for ITIL(R) process interaction and compliance."

The new package is available now. For more information, go here.