Server magic

New automated server configuration management software promises to lessen your staff's workload in the data center while boosting server security, configuration consistency and availability.

Network downtime is not an option for Priceline.com . The Web-based "name your price" travel services company - widely known for its comic ads featuring "Star Trek" legend William Shatner's crooning - cannot separate business from technology. Priceline's IT infrastructure, applications and supporting software tools are the business.

Specifically, the company's bottom line depends directly on 500 Microsoft Windows NT and Unix servers staying available to support millions of customer page views per day.

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Network downtime is not an option for Priceline.com . The Web-based "name your price" travel services company - widely known for its comic ads featuring "Star Trek" legend William Shatner's crooning - cannot separate business from technology. Priceline's IT infrastructure, applications and supporting software tools are the business.

Specifically, the company's bottom line depends directly on 500 Microsoft Windows NT and Unix servers staying available to support millions of customer page views per day.

"Technology is the foundation of our business. If the Web site is closed, then the store is closed," says Ron Rose, Priceline CIO. The Norwalk, Conn., company estimates that one hour of downtime costs about $50,000.

So last year when a slew of new companies started making claims about reducing manual tasks, speeding problem resolution, automating server configuration, and providing consistency and security across data centers, Rose paid attention. "We take mean time to repair on our servers so seriously that I had to investigate. The store cannot appear closed to any customers at any time," he says.

BladeLogic, a systems and server management start-up, stood out among the companies Rose investigated. The company's BladeLogic Configuration Manager  software modules provision, analyze and manage networked servers from a secure console. The software automates many configuration processes that normally are handled manually, such as the application of patches or the collection of inventory information. Rose says most appealing is that BladeLogic provides cross-platform management.

"Data center architectures are very problematic from an administrative perspective, so tools that help unify the administration of these heterogeneous environments are the wave of the future," he says.

Priceline runs two Web site infrastructures across three physical sites - corporate headquarters and two data centers - with a total of 400 production Wintel or NT-based servers and about 100 big Sun servers for Oracle databases. Rose deployed BladeLogic about nine months ago in the data centers and has run the software in full production mode for about six months. With BladeLogic, "there are fewer detectable errors and a greater level of security across servers," he says.

And, while Priceline has yet to perform a return-on-investment study, from a cost standpoint, Rose says he can control more servers with fewer people because manual configurations have been eliminated.

Moonlit servers and spinning plates

Besides BladeLogic, companies such as CenterRun , Jareva , Moonlight  and PlateSpin  have emerged in the past 18 months or so promising to reduce staff hours and eliminate configuration errors when provisioning data centers.

And established management software vendors such as Hewlett-Packard , Novadigm  and Marimba  have enhanced their software to distribute patches automatically or configure servers consistently across data centers, for better security and availability. These management vendors are responding to a number of factors: the shortage of skilled IT workers; the need to eliminate server configuration errors, which can lead to network downtime, on e-business and e-commerce Web sites; and the evolution of software toward automation features.

Managed services provider Loudcloud even changed its business model and its name to get into the automated configuration management game. The company, now called Opsware, sold its managed services business to EDS, which also is Opsware's largest customer. Opsware's System 3 platform provides the data center management and automated server configuration Loudcloud once delivered as a service.

These companies all offer one form or another of server configuration and change management software, an IT area that vendors and users either overlooked or underestimated in the past as they rushed to provision servers and set up data centers for growing e-business initiatives.

But as network managers look to squeeze more out of existing staff and servers, industry watchers say automated configuration management tools will become a must-have in large corporate networks.

"Right now IT staffing is inelastic. Staff cannot solve the server provisioning and management problem for the long term," says Ronni Colville, a research director with Gartner. "People don't scale in the distributed way that e-business servers scale. I don't see any way to staff up to adequately support the servers that support e-business."

While specifics vary among vendors, the software works with a "master" centralized server and software agents deployed on managed servers throughout the data center. The server software communicates with the agents, which capture configuration and performance data on each managed server. In some cases, the software includes scripts that can kick off automated actions to report configuration errors or even dynamically change the configuration based on the knowledge built into the software. The master server can contain a data repository in which all user, application and server changes and actions are stored, or users can save the data elsewhere.

Software applications that perform specific automated tasks, such as deployment, comparison, notification and transport, also reside on the central server. And some vendors offer applications or software modules specific to third-party products, such as BEA Systems' WebLogic or IBM WebSphere application servers, that provide automation out of the box.

These software tools can be pricey, ranging in cost from BladeLogic's $25,000 entry price to Opsware's $250,000 low-end implementation. But they promise to reduce staff hours by automating server provisioning and configuration - both labor-intensive tasks, especially as the number of servers in a network grows. The products also can provide security by scheduling and distributing software patches on a one-to-many basis, eliminating holes that human administrators potentially could miss.

In the country's best interest

This security aspect is what led the U.S. Department of Energy to implement Opsware's System 3 automation platform. The agency wanted to better secure technology assets and manage software licenses across its 130,000 users, says Karen Evans, the department's CIO, because it felt "an increased responsibility to protect essential national cyber assets."