BMC brings management to the cloud

BMC announced it had partnered to integrate its management software with Amazon's cloud environment, a move the company says would help enterprise IT managers more easily deploy and manage virtual elements in private and public clouds.

BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) platform will help clients looking to deploy virtual servers to private and public clouds, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The two vendors have been working together for several months to let customers extend their internal data centers to Amazon's EC2. Using BMC software, such as its Atrium Configuration Management Database, enterprise IT managers can request internal physical or virtual or external Amazon computing resources through a self-service portal that has been integrated with Amazon APIs.

“We are taking an evolutionary path to help a customer manage virtual resources and cloud environment in their own data center. Then if they decide to offset their resources with an external provider such as Amazon, we allow them to use the same tools to track changes and monitor that environment,” says BMC CTO Kia Behnia

By tapping the automation technology BMC acquired with BladeLogic, customers will be able to extend existing IT infrastructure or add more to a cloud environment, without sacrificing monitoring. The management software maker will also put to use the technology it acquired with ProactiveNet to enable dynamic threshold capabilities in the cloud, BMC says.

The company has also been working for the past 18 months with customers to incorporate best practices and workflows into its existing products, Behnia explains. For instance, as companies move resources into the cloud they want to be able to track configuration and other changes in that environment. Integrating with Amazon EC2 enables such data to be pulled into BMC's CMDB automatically. BMC is also working to capture VMotion moves or updates and port them to the CMDB, and the company is integrating VMware security guidelines into its BladeLogic technology.

“We see cloud management as the next level of maturity beyond virtualization management,” Behnia says. “We are going to let the customers choose their cloud provider and support multiple virtualization technologies.”