Cisco and BMC: ‘Major breakthrough’ in management for unified computing system

Cisco and BMC Software have announced their collaboration to deliver what they call a ‘major management breakthrough’ for the new Cisco Unified Computing System.

Cisco’s Prem Jain, senior vice president of its Server and Access Virtualisation Business Unit, said today when announcing the collaboration, that the combining of BMC’s business service management and Cisco’s unified computing system represented a ‘quantum leap forward’ in enhancing customers’ ability to provision and reconfigure the entire stack of mission-critical business services, along with the supporting applications and the underlying virtual and physical resources.

“In many data centres, these manual tasks take weeks or even months to accomplish. The combined Cisco and BMC solution is designed to automate these actions through a single management console, potentially allowing these tasks to be completed in just minutes.”

Jain said Cisco’s unified computing system manager offered a deep integration with BMC bladelogic service automation and BMC atrium configuration management database (CMDB).

“The combined solution helps to enable customers to define fully configured, customised service profiles with fully provisioned application environments, and then deploy them rapidly to meet their business or computing requirements. BMC atrium CMDB gives real-time insight to the business impact of the Cisco unified computing system while BMC’s larger business service management portfolio offers performance management, service management, and IT process automation for the unified computing system or the full enterprise IT infrastructure.“

Jain said Cisco would deliver the unified computing system pre-packaged with BMC’s bladelogic service automation suite, including BMC atrium technology, when it becomes generally available to customers starting in the second quarter of 2009.

The two companies have said they will also collaborate to deliver joint sales engagements, technical support, professional services and technology development.

According to Jain, proper management of dynamic, virtual IT environments is critical for realising their full business impact, and he said the unified computing system represented a complete paradigm shift in terms of what it cost to acquire, manage and administer IT environments of the future.

Working closely with Cisco, Jain said BMC had delivered the very important pieces of software that, he claimed, made the unified computing system ‘revolution’ real.