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Datacenter Automation Decisions - Rev2

As referenced by my last post, you can see this is high priority for everyone at my company. We have decided that Bladelogic can fit one area very well, but the vision, strategy, and direction of the company is not in line with our needs. Bladelogic had a stronger POC team, and better talent as well. If Opsware can do what we need for the application configuration management and deployment, then it would be the best choice for the following reasons:

  • Dependency mapping and use of the agents to do that.
    • The EMC/nlayers solution is better but not feasible for our network
    • Opsware has an excellent visual application manager which can help us troubleshoot problems and changes quickly.
  • End to end view of Network and soon Storage assets.
    • We have started a POC with the NAS product, and it can deliver very good network data to the server tool.
    • Alterpoint is next week, who Bladelogic partners with for network info in the tool. The integration is not as tight, which is understandable.
  • Scalability and resiliency.
    • Bladelogic has a lack of built in replication and agent failover. The agent and replication can be adapted using 3rd party tools.
    • Our ultimate scope is over 20,000 systems with varying uses of the tool.

We are going to deploy Opsware before a general decision is made for the company, and if the product cannot do what we need we will go with Bladelogic. Either way with our lack of centralized authentication, the major issue is going to be getting some kind of agent to deploy software on the systems. We will see how this pans out.

Needless to say Bladelogic is not happy about this decision, and rightly so. I have explained to them that this is not a final decision, but it’s a better direction due to strategy and needs of our business. Software is a mix of capabilities, direction, and the suite of offerings a single entity can offer us.

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