EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q1 2013

Transcription

1 EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q By Torsten Volk ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) Radar Report March 2013

2 BMC Software EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) BMC Software Average Architecture & Integration Functionality Radar for Private Cloud Platforms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS): Q Deployment & Administration Vendor Strength Cost Advantage Quick Profile: BMC Founded: 1980 / Revenue: $2.2b Cloud Type: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS Use Case: Brownfield, greenfield Target Market: Large Businesses, Service Providers Downloadable Trial: No Implementation Effort: High Products Reviewed: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management BMC Cloud Operations Management Complementing Products: BMC Atrium BMC BladeLogic BMC Remedy BMC ProactiveNet Hypervisors Supported: VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, AIX Integration: Amazon EC2, VMware vcloud and vsphere, Microsoft Azure Introduction BMC Software: Best Cloud The BMC private and hybrid cloud solution consists of Security Management BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM, for service and EMA Radar for Private Cloud Platforms: Q infrastructure provisioning) and BMC Cloud Operations Management (Cloud Ops, for SLA and compliance driven cloud service management). Application performance monitoring capabilities are added by BMC s ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite. The BMC cloud products are deeply anchored in datacenter and IT automation and are based on the entire portfolio of BMC s IT management tools, such as Atrium, BladeLogic, and Remedy. PAGE 2

3 Deployment and Administration Customers are happy with BMC Consulting Services, which delivers cloud deployment and integration services. The BMC team is well known for having a deep bench, with plenty of expertise in neighboring non-bmc technologies. This capability is key to aligning business, IT and the technology to enable the integration of cloud with current enterprise systems to leverage existing investments and is a core part of BMC s value proposition. BMC Cloud Ops analytics capabilities, based on ProactiveNet technology, tie application and infrastructure performance to business service requirements and provide the IT department with early warning of problems that may impact the business. BMC Cloud Ops is easy to deploy, dynamically maintains performance thresholds for the infrastructure cloud, virtual and physical it monitors, and proactively identifies the potential impact on business services in real-time. This takes a significant burden off of IT operations staff, as static threshold setting and monitoring is labor intensive, error prone, and difficult to maintain in dynamic environments. In case of critical performance issues, BMC Cloud Ops provides the guidance necessary to execute a root cause analysis focused on fixing the most business relevant issues first. BMC s Service Governor constitutes a sophisticated tagging system, where administrators can attach SLA, compliance, and other properties to resource pools. This enables policy-based service placement and allows end users to request services and application environments without the administrator having to worry about micro-managing the proper selection of resources for the automated fulfillment of these requests. BMC Cloud Ops can monitor VCE s vblock VMware vsphere, Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus switches, and EMC VMAX storage in a service-centric manner. Based on this monitoring data, BMC Cloud Ops can be used for ongoing capacity management, alerting IT administrators of the necessity to add additional storage, network, or server resources. Architecture and Integration BMC CLM and BMC Cloud Ops constitute an excellent solution when it comes to managing a heterogeneous IT environment in a more efficient manner. BMC s platform independence enables customers to manage storage, hypervisors, servers, and existing ITIL solutions, as well as the applications and services that they support. BMC customers reported that the ability to manage VMware s own cloud platform, vcloud Director, was an essential decision criterion when selecting BMC CLM and BMC Cloud Ops. BMC cloud products are known to scale well, without any single points of failure. Monitored by BMC s excellent Cloud Ops solution, BMC s cloud platform offers the resiliency required for large enterprise or service provider environments. In its latest version (3.0), BMC CLM includes a robust orchestration layer, enabling easy resource and application integration via a flexible workflow engine (see Figure A for an architectural overview). CLM dynamically creates the VLANs, firewalls, and load balancing configurations necessary to deploy a service blueprint, through one single API call. PAGE 3

4 Figure A - Architectural Overview for BMC CLM VCE vblock certification, and tight integration with VMware s vcloud, Amazon EC2, and other cloud stacks, makes BMC CLM an excellent cloud platform for orchestrating a plethora of heterogeneous resources along the lines of business services. Within this context, it is important to note that when integrating BMC CLM this is true for any other cloud product with existing infrastructure, significant planning and prototyping is required. Customers who had neglected this initial planning process reported a degree of frustration with BMC CLM, without directly blaming BMC for these problems. While BMC currently does not support OpenStack, the company has announced adding the capability to provision and manage compute and storage resources via OpenStack in OpenStack support will bring significant value to BMC customers, as workloads can then be distributed across a constantly growing set of public clouds, facilitating elasticity and scalability, and addressing potential vendor lock-in concerns. EMA was impressed with BMC s security awareness and BMC CLM s capabilities to deploy and manage firewalls from within its GUI. BMC CLM is able to spin up virtual appliances as needed and manages these appliances by directly connecting to the API of the respective firewall. BMC abstracts the firewall vendor-specific management methods and can therefore offer a consistent GUI across security vendor platforms. This tight integration between the self-service provisioning aspect of cloud and enterprise IT security is essential for operating a cloud that can host business critical workloads. PAGE 4

5 Functionality BMC s service blueprints enable end users to provision business services from the storage, network, and server infrastructure to the multi-tier application layer. These environments can consist of physical, virtual, and cloud resources. Service blueprints also include sizing options for each environment, as well as policy and regulatory compliance elements. These blueprints provide a building block approach to service design by layering different infrastructure, sizing, and compliance options on to the application model so that many different service options can be configured from one blueprint at provisioning time. Tying into BMC s BladeLogic server automation software, BMC CLM can provision environments that are HIPAA, SOX, or PCI compliant. IT operations can then decide whether to charge a premium for these compliant environments. Users can also add custom monitoring requirements to their services. Customers like the BMC CLM user interface and are happy with the time savings resulting from the BMC CLM implementation. Out-of-the-box integration with BMC s BladeLogic server and network automation products, as well as with most common performance monitoring solutions, including BMC s ProactiveNet, enables customers to leverage existing datacenter investments, through the use of BMC CLM as a self-service layer. The BMC CLM portal is comprehensive in terms of features, such as chargeback, SLA & policy management, service management, and security management. Cost Advantage BMC s Global Services team is known for its wide range of consulting and training capabilities, and excellent ability to deliver business-centric solutions. EMA found a high degree of customer satisfaction with the ROI of the BMC cloud portfolio. BMC s business service focused approach, driven by compliance policies, and monitored by the BMC Cloud Ops analytics engine is key to this efficiency. From a software and maintenance cost perspective, BMC is in line with its Big 4 competitors IBM, CA Technologies, and HP. The exact cost of a cloud based on BMC CLM and BMC Cloud Ops depends on deployment size and the complexity of service requirements. Vendor Strength Founded in 1980, business service management is deeply anchored within BMC s DNA. With revenue of $2.2 billion and almost 7,000 staff, BMC is one of today s major providers of enterprise systems management software. EMA applauds BMC s focus on tailoring its cloud offerings to tightly fit its existing business service centric portfolio. Enabling customers to leverage their existing IT investments when implementing cloud is a core differentiator for BMC. EMA s interviews with BMC customers confirm the importance of seeing cloud as just an additional abstraction layer similar to virtualization that enables organizations to be more agile and efficient. EMA is impressed with BMC s customer focus and the company s ability to successfully complete even more ambitious and complex cloud projects. PAGE 5

6 Strengths and Limitations Strengths Excellent automation and orchestration: BMC CLM offers excellent capabilities of orchestrating and automating business workflows across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. User friendly: The BMC CLM and BMC Cloud Ops user interfaces are some of the cleanest, most modern, and easiest to use in the marketplace. Hardware vendor independent: As BMC does not sell hardware, the company has focused on making its server, network, and storage automation and management solutions compatible to a large ecosystem of vendors. SLA-centric approach: The BMC Service Governor is easy to understand and use, enabling customers to enforce the consistent implementation of SLA and compliance requirements. Proactive service-driven capacity and performance management: BMC Cloud Ops is an excellent solution for ongoing and proactive capacity and performance management. Security: BMC s cloud impressed with strong security management features. Chargeback: BMC s chargeback and showback capabilities are comprehensive. Service Blueprints: BMC s service templates are highly configurable by end users. This flexibility enables customers to limit the number of overall service templates that have to be managed. Limitations Professional service requirements: Implementation and integration of BMC CLM and BMC Cloud Ops require significant professional services. This can be expected due to the brownfield character of most implementations, but still has to be mentioned for full disclosure. However, BMC does offer a Rapid Cloud offering that can deploy a foundational cloud in 30 days. SLAs are not part of application blueprints: Performance requirements cannot be directly assigned to service blueprints, but have to be defined from a separate interface. Integration: BMC Cloud Ops capabilities for capacity management and root cause analysis are nicely integrated with BMC CLM from a functional perspective, but are not fully integrated in the BMC CLM graphical user interface. Workloads not dynamically moved: BMC CLM is not yet able to move application environments based on impending SLA violations. However, BMC CLM supports virtualization infrastructure capabilities for dynamic workload placement, such as the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler. PAGE 6

7 About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter or Facebook. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 1995 North 57th Court, Suite 120 Boulder, CO Phone: Fax: BMC-Profile