BMC sees its new Atrium 7.5, due for official launch next month, as the platform for delivering business service management (BSM) going forward. Alongside this is the important but hard to do addition of applying ‘What-If' testing of infrastructure changes before they are actually deployed.
One of the problems for a large infrastructure management vendor is the sheer volume of individual products it offers for specific IT infrastructure tasks, with further third party products typically also deployed within any organisation it is supplying. To provide a business service, a series of these products may need to be brought together and orchestrated to run in a particular way.
Atrium, as the name suggests, provides a central area for integrating all the many information and functionality sources using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver BSM. This should allow customers to achieve substantial improvements in cost, efficiency and speed of deployment.
Atrium's core services include: a service catalogue, impact analysis, reconciliation and normalisation engines, which are applied to discovered configuration items (CIs), and dynamic service modelling. It provides applications for: discovery, analytics, service level management, the Atrium Orchestrator to order the tasks and dashboards to provide visual management.
For BMC the configuration management database (CMDB) has become the core equipment data repository and is core to Atrium therefore; BMC is the market leader in this approach (as most have ‘bolted-on' the ITIL-championed CMDB which means it gets updated after the fact).
Matthieu Laurenceau, BMC's Lead Technical Marketing in EMEA told me: "We see the CMDB as a reliable single source of truth on the infrastructure components".
This leads us to its Unified Service Model (USM) 7.5, the idea being to provide an integrated approach for discussing, representing and measuring how services get provided and consumed. This can help in reaching a point of being able to holistically view the total cost of delivering services from a constantly updating service model. Part of this is achieved by the Central Service Catalog (-ue for UK readers!) which is supported by an extended data model. The dynamic service model is updated based on queries and templates with cost tracking enabled by Atrium.
Laurenceau explained that, with an SOA approach, there can be loosely-coupled product integrations with web services located anywhere in the infrastructure, created and collapsed without damaging the infrastructure but controlled via the centralised UDDI web services registry.
Read the complete article by Peter Williams in IT-Director.com.
