VMware unveils CIO management tool
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Infrastructure software vendor launches interface for managing the IT department alongside new “CloudOps” and “DevOps” tools
VMware, the virtualisation and cloud infrastructure software vendor, today unveiled a new tool that it claims will help CIOs manage their IT operations at its VMworld Europe conference in Copenhagen
The IT Business Management Suite 5.0 is built on functionality developed by DigitalFuel, the Israeli IT finance management application provider VMware acquired in June 2011 for $85 million.
The tool, which forms part of the company's vSphere infrastructure management suite, displays IT management metrics such as financial indicators, service level agreements and systems performance indicators.
According to Mark Robinson, solutions consultant director at Digital Fuel who spoke at Information Age's Managing IT Cost Effectively conference shortly before the acquisition, US insurance giant Nationwide cut its $300 million IT budget by 5% after using the company's system.
VMware made two other IT management-related announcements. The first was an upgrade to vCenter Operations, the company's IT operations management suite, to include new dashboards demonstrating the health, efficiency and risk exposure of IT systems. This, VMware's chief technology office Steve Herrod said, would support the emerging discipline of “CloudOps”, IT operations management specifically for cloud-based systems.
The second was the unveiling of the vFabric Application Management Suite, which allows software developers and admins to see key operational metrics of a given application, for example the number of transactions that are failing.
VMware said this product would help organisations support “DevOps”, an emerging methodology that promotes greater collaboration and overlap between software developers and IT operations managers.
James Governor, of developer-focused analyst company RedMonk, was not convinced that introducing of Vmware's new application management tool necessarily bring about DevOps. “DevOps is about managing IT operations with a deep understanding of your applications,” he said. “Just because something has a nice GUI showing application performance doesn't mean its DevOps."
None of these announcements seemed to generate as much interest at the conference as a brief glimpse during Herrod's keynote of AppBlast, a system that allows users to operate Windows applications remotely using any device that supports HTML5. ApplBlast, which was first revealed at VMware's US conference in August, works by streaming images of the application onto the client device.
Love the platform, the management, not so much
Here’s why.
Business-ready clouds need great management. And as we have seen in recent weeks, business needs great management. Not everyone is cut out for it, has that special something in the DNA. We watched one pass and another one crash and burn recently.
And your Cloud should be no different. And while some people and tools are great at management, others, well it is not as simple as just saying “management”. And when was the last time an infrastructure vendor provided great management?
Great management requires a tops-down business focus (not a bottoms-up infrastructure view), an integrated lifecycle approach that improves how work gets done (instead of perpetuating silos), experience across architecture design and processes (not only technology), trust and platform independence (no bias or self-interest)and a commitment to heterogeneity (not lock-in).
The Doctor gets nervous when he hears the word “bundle”--code name “Suite”. What we have to do is look under the hood and see if this is really an integrated, platform approach or marketing.
Real clouds are built on something more tangible, despite the scientific claims that they are built with vapor.
We have been discussing this recently on our blog, would love to hear what you think. Bmc.com/connect
@DRCloudBMC
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