BMC Software Inc. on Monday will continue to roll out products that exploit its new Patrol 7 distributed architecture for application management.
The enterprise systems management provider, calling this the “Enablement Release,” shipped a new agent, made the Patrol management platform easier to install, and enhanced the security of the management suite.
The latest release of the more modular Patrol will support additional Patrol enhancements due later this year, including a new console and software distribution capabilities. It provides a common communications protocol, common data repository and common reporting.
The new agent is an overlay for existing Patrol Knowledge Module agents, so that users can upgrade without having to de-install existing KMs. It uses less processing on the host system and requires less memory to run.
The new agent uses an installation mechanism now common across all BMC management offerings. The intent behind the mechanism is to address a common customer complaint—that installation is too labor intensive and time consuming.
“IT operations teams dont have to dedicate people for deploying Windows and experts to deploy Unix. Through the same user interface the operator can deploy software in either environment—they dont need detailed knowledge of what theyre managing. This increases the speed of deployment by 50 to 70 percent,” said Sean Duclaux, director of product marketing for BMC, in Houston.
The issue has been a thorny one for users, and one BMC official some time ago declared that he wanted to see installation time reduced to four and a half hours, according to Sue Aldrich, analyst at Patricia Seybold Group in Boston. “I thought that was a very difficult goal but a very good goal. I think that its a big deal that theyre a lot closer to that,” she said.
BMC enhanced Patrols security mechanisms so that users can define management profiles and classifications of job responsibilities, so that only the appropriate people in a group of users can perform the Patrol management tasks to which they are assigned.
BMC also added support for Linux on IBMs new zSeries mainframes. Duclaux also said the BMC is working with Microsoft .Net beta releases.
BMC this month released a handful of products that exploit the new installation and security enhancements in the platform. They include Patrol for Microsoft Windows Servers, an updated version of Patrol for Desktops, Patrol for Microsoft Host Integration, Patrol for Compaq Insight Manager, Patrol for Microsoft Windows Servers-Perform/Predict, Patrol for Unix-Perform/Predict, Patrol Console, and Patrol Explorer.