BladeLogic aims to streamline data center management

BladeLogic is aiming to streamline management tasks in the data center by enabling IT managers to get a big-picture view of system changes made by a variety of automated tools.

Today, IT undergoes numerous changes daily in response to business demands, but typically those shifts are made in isolation with different IT groups using their own tools. While some organizations use manual efforts such as runbooks to keep track of changes, BladeLogic's new Orchestration Manager software is designed to automatically integrate processes and centralizes data.

“The problem with today’s tools is they primarily focus on automating a set of management tasks that are done by a particular siloed group in isolation and don’t necessarily take into consideration the dependencies these tasks have across [an organization],” says Vick Vaishnavi, director of marketing at BladeLogic. “As a result a lot of companies end up trashing a lot of expensive man hours trying to reconcile their actions.”

Orchestration Manager, which is priced starting at $150,000, lets data center managers integrate BladeLogic’s flagship management software with a range of third-party products from vendors such as BMC, CA and HP, Vaishnavi says.

“It’s the glue stick to integrate products together,” he says. “They can integrate from a workflow perspective, they can integrate from a data exchange, an event exchange, perspective and they can integrate from a run time perspective in terms of who gets to run when based on parameters from other products.”

The idea is instead of buying a big management package from a single vendor, enterprises can “knit together 100% of the functionality they get from tools they have from different vendors and end up with a better integrated solution,” Vaishnavi says. “And there’s no vendor lock-in.”

BladeLogic is announcing Orchestration Manager just a few weeks after introducing Version 7 of its flagship software, which gives customers a more integrated way to manage changes across applications and infrastructure. BladeLogic Version 7 includes updates to BladeLogic Operations Manager and introduces BladeLogic Application Release Manager, which lets customers set consistent guidelines across development, test and production environments.

BladeLogic 7 is priced at $1,500 per server managed.

Analysts say BladeLogic is getting a jump on the competition by providing “cross process” management capabilities.

“With Sarbanes-Oxley and all these external audits and internal audits, getting a handle on change control is a real issue for data centers. This is a nice improvement for BladeLogic,” says Donna Scott, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

She says competitors, such as Opsware, don’t yet have the kind of workflow integration BladeLogic can now offer.