Data Center Automation

Learn, resolve, and control your automated data center

Are you?

With BMC, You Will:

Trying to increase IT efficiency?

Increase the efficiency of IT and

Dealing with manual tasks and

isolated pockets of automation?

Considering how to connect broken

process and communication loops?

Worried about incomplete compliance coverage and remediation?

Missing a unified view of IT?

reduce downtime

Deliver full automation of recurring

tasks without scripting

Close communication loops and

integrate processes

Ensure full compliance coverage

with integrated remediation

Executive summary
IT departments have been working on automation for a long time. However, the
results have fallen short of expectations. While individual areas may have good
automation, whether through point solutions or custom development, overall
processes often require manual tasks or significant scripting to join disparate pieces
together. As a result, IT departments are forced to operate in fire-fighting mode,
rushing from emergency to emergency without time to focus on strategic tasks and
goals. Even simple questions require significant effort and expertise to answer.

REAL-WORLD RESULTS
Cisco Media Services reduced the time to
provision servers from 24 hours to 20-25
minutes.

Virgin Mobile is able to deploy an entire Tibco

platform in just three minutes

Edmunds.com took just two days to provision

95 servers down from three months

Columbia Sportswear takes five hours to

change passwords on all their network devices
down from 60+ every 90 days

The result is a lack of efficiency in the data center, which can lead to outages and
downtime. Compliance audits often cover only a portion of the IT estate. Whats more,
documentation is incomplete and time-consuming to generate, and remediation
efforts are hampered by disconnected processes. Communication across teams is
inefficient, frequently working only thanks to informal relationships. All this makes it
very hard for managers to base their decision-making on the real state of IT.
BMC has extensive experience in automating data center configuration management
tasks across physical, virtual, and cloud-based systems. This experience has been
codified into mature solutions that have been tested by some of the worlds most
demanding IT organizations. BMCs Data Center Automation solutions are structured
around three fundamental areas of value:

Learn: View the state of IT in real time, compare configurations to each other, and
automate repetitive configuration management tasks

Resolve: Identify drift from desired state, audit regularly for compliance to policies,
and remediate discrepancies automatically

Control: Record changes as they occur, deliver requested changes automatically,

and document the evolving state of IT
The BMC approach ensures that IT delivers rapid business value by automating
recurring configuration management tasks quickly, driving additional value by adding
automated compliance management, including remediation, and integrating these
actions with existing best-practice process frameworks.

The BMC Difference

Business challenge

Heterogeneous support for

all major operating systems
and virtualization platforms,
whether on- or off-premise, as
well as network equipment and
database vendors

As ITs role in the business increases and demands placed on it continue to grow old models are
falling short of satisfying requirements. Where manual tasks, homegrown scripts, and the occasional
point solution might have been enough to keep the lights on in the data center in the past, new
expectations of agility, flexibility, and cost savings have made that model obsolete. Businesses expect a
rapid and reliable turnaround on requests for IT support. Complex and diverse IT infrastructures, different
teams operating without strong communications and processes, and increased requirements make
operating a data center far from a solved problem.

Dynamic, full-stack provisioning

of server, network, and database
resources
Real-time configuration visibility
at an extremely granular level
Model-driven configuration
management, with built-in
intelligence to reduce complexity
Unified configuration and
compliance management with
target-aware, closed-loop
remediation

How BMC can help

For more than 20 years, BMC has been helping organizations around the world increase the efficiency
and impact of IT. Working with each organizations unique user base, technology platforms, compliance
requirements, operational best practices, and cultural context, BMC offers solutions that quickly deliver
value, thus enabling each organization to grow and develop its IT support. This expertise ensures that
your investments in IT deliver additional value, driven by increased efficiency and reduced costs, enabling
positive business impact from IT.

Learn
Change is a constant and nowhere more so than in a data center. This means that the first task is to
understand the real-time state of IT. Analyzing live configurations, you can eliminate the delays that
traditionally occur while a reference database is updated or a discovery process is executed. Whats more,
because BMC Data Center Automation solutions work on actual configurations, regardless of how they are
applied, these solutions can co-exist with your existing tools or even with manual actions. This helps
adoption enormously by avoiding discontinuities and disruptions in working processes.
Once a live view is achieved, it is important to be able to compare configurations, whether between
different members of the same group (these two systems should be the same, but they behave
differently) or over time (it was working yesterday, what changed?). These are the sorts of repetitive
actions that traditionally have consumed an enormous amount of IT personnels time.
Finally, it is necessary to deploy new configurations without requiring manual connections to each
system or new scripts for each task. Repetitive actions (add a user, edit a configuration file, change
permissions on a folder, restart a service, etc.) are individually small, but together take up a significant
proportion of IT staffs time with frustrating tasks that interrupt more strategic work.

Resolve
The pace of change is increasing as business expectations of IT become more sophisticated and more
frequent. The first step to change management, therefore, is to identify changes. To do so, a reference
configuration is needed. This might be a live reference environment, an historical snapshot of the
environment when it was in a known good state, or a policy configuration that reflects security baselines,
operational best practices, or industry-standard policies, such as Sarbanes-Oxley or PCI. The changes
need to be identified in sufficient detail to avoid both false positives and false negatives.
Compliance to the desired state is a process, not an event. Even if the system starts out compliant, it
will inevitably drift from that initial state as various manual and automated changes occur. For example,
components are restarted or updated, users are created or deleted, patches are applied, and so on. That
means that regular audits need to be performed against all applicable systems. The targets of an audit
might be static or dynamic, meaning either a fixed list or a group defined according to certain properties
(all systems in the DMZ or all systems with component X).
To be effective, compliance needs to encompass more than just audits. An audit will almost always
unearth discrepancies differences from the expected and desired configuration. Trying to fix those
by hand is not only time-consuming, but also requires documentation updates to ensure that the issue
was resolved and the system is now compliant not to mention the possibility that new errors might be
introduced by accident during the remediation process. Automated remediation is the way to avoid this
vicious cycle, enabling administrators to bring configurations into compliance with one click. Of course,
not all configurations can or should be identical, so support for documenting temporary or permanent
exceptions is also needed. These exceptions can then be taken into account for subsequent audits,
avoiding over- or under-reporting of compliance violations.

Control
As your processes become more automated, greater control is needed. Many organizations already
have best practices in place, and now need only integrate those best practices into the newly automated
internal IT processes. Discrepancies can be automatically documented as incidents, creating audit trails for
routine events, without requiring manual action by IT staff. Change and maintenance windows also can be
enforced automatically, and related changes can be managed together, avoiding collisions and conflicts.
To ensure full coverage of the change process, automatic change requests are created without
requiring user action to ensure that all changes have an associated record. Routine changes can be

Key Benefits
Reduce the unit cost of IT
Avoid security breaches and
outages due to configuration
errors
Increase and document
compliance levels, avoiding
penalties

approved automatically according to process without slowing down execution, and

manual approvals can be implemented where necessary, enabling a policy of approval
by exception, where only events out of the ordinary need manual intervention.
Process automation enables IT teams to share the value of automation beyond
immediate configuration management tasks. Automation tools can gather real-time
detailed inventory data and license utilization data. The historical configuration data
can also support root cause analysis together with monitoring information. In the other
direction, change management can avoid automated changes colliding or overlapping
with manual changes or changes from different tools. Mapping infrastructure to
business processes can also help in assigning priorities or security policies.

Data Center Automation and Business Service Management

By addressing the primary data center challenges through the automation of key tasks
and processes across the hybrid data center, you are taking the critical first step toward
Business Service Management (BSM). BSM takes the IT you have or will need and adds
the visibility and control of an integrated service management platform. BSM manages
services, supporting applications, and infrastructure across a broad set of operating
environments from physical infrastructure, to virtual infrastructure, and in the cloud.
As the BSM pioneer and market leader, BMC offers a low risk, modular approach to
implementing BSM. BMC has successfully delivered more BSM implementations than
anyone else and brings that experience into every engagement.

business runs on i.t.

i.t. runs on bmc software.
Business runs better when IT runs its best. Tens of thousands of IT organizations
around the world -- from small and mid-market businesses to the Global 100 -- rely
on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications
across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers
cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice of IT
management solutions, including industry-leading Business Service Management and
Cloud Management offerings. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2012,
BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

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Learn more
With deep roots in automation of servers,
network devices, and databases and
market-proven experience BMC can help you
address both your immediate and long- term
data center automation goals. To learn more,
please visit www.bmc.com/automation.