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BMC Software Inc. wants to bring the role of the mainframe in its Business Service Management initiative more clearly into focus.
To do it, the Houston company is announcing new integration tools that let customers link its SIM (Service Impact Manager), Mainview mainframe management and SmartDBA data management products. The integration will allow customers to manage mainframe applications and databases that span mainframes and distributed systems in a way that helps them stay within the bounds of their SLAs (service-level agreements), officials said.
BMC, which will introduce the integration tools this week at its Business Service Management Executives event in New York, will demonstrate how customers can integrate business impact reporting and analysis between the mainframe and distributed environments.
With more complex, multitiered online applications drawing data from mainframes, the ability to quickly prioritize which infrastructure problems to address first is key to maintaining service levels, said one BMC customer familiar with BMCs plans.
“The integration of mainframe events tied in to the distributed world is important to us,” said the user, who asked not to be named. “You have applications at the top of a complex grid of dependencies. If you have a problem with a critical application and youre close to breaching your SLA, you want to fix the problem that costs you the dollars first.”
SIM analyzes data from infrastructure management tools to provide business-aware information about the real-time state of services. “SIM is the traffic cop that ties IT to the business, [with which] you can make sure the SLAs sink in,” Bill Miller, general manager of BMCs mainframe business unit, told eWEEK. “Now customers most critical data will be able to work with our SIM. That will give them a way to set up SLAs and respond faster to events that occur in the database.”
BMCs new integration plan is delivered through two new products, BMC Impact Integration for Mainview and BMC Impact Integration for SmartDBA. In the Mainview integration, thousands of events generated by Mainviews AutoOperator are filtered down to just those events important to SIM, according to Miller.
“With the second piece of this, were connecting the SmartDBA mainframe and distributed piece to the SIM,” said Miller.
The new SmartDBA tool also includes a console for database administrators working with mainframe and distributed databases. It adds enhanced, automated problem detection and resolution.
Another new offering, SmartDBA Performance for DB2, is also integrated with SIM.
Mainview integration will be available early next month, with SmartDBA integration due several weeks later.
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