Application Management : announcment

BAC 8.03 release - what's new

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:56:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Release Highlights

Service Level Management (SLM) enhancements:

SLM now enables customization of the First day of month setting which is used in calculating agreements.

A new business rule, EMS Events Availability, calculates status for the System Availability KPI assigned to an EMS Monitor CI. This enables you to include EMS events as part of the SLM calculation.

Platform enhancements:

Update of Java Runtime Environment running on Business Availability Center servers to JRE 1.5.0_18

Mutual authentication: Users can set up authentication for both the Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) Probe and Business Availability Center running an embedded UCMDB, with certificates. The certificate for each side is sent and authenticated before the connection is established.

Real User Monitor Engine enhancements:

Support for Oracle Forms NCA version 10g

System Availability Management enhancement:

Added the ability to control the location of the ellipsis ("...") used in long labels in System Availability Management Reports. This enables you to move the ellipsis from the end to the middle of the label.

Dashboard enhancement:

Added the ability to drill down from Dashboard to the Event Log report from Windows and UNIX CIs.

TransactionVision enhancement:

Support for LW-SSO 2.2 has been added to the UI/Job Server.

Database Admin privileges are no longer required to set up a database for use with TransactionVision.

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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Join the HP Software group on LinkedIn and/or the Business Availability Center group on LinkedIn.

Announcing a New BSM Solution Offering for Virtualization

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

The new offerings include enhancements to HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials, HP Network Automation, and HP Operations Manager software.

According to a recent report from Gartner⁽¹⁾, "Virtualization’s impact on the overall IT industry has been dramatic, and virtualization will continue to be the leading catalyst for infrastructure and operations software change through 2013. Organizations are looking at ways to cut costs, better utilize assets, and reduce implementation and management time and complexity."

Although virtualization is often adopted to help reduce capital expenditures, it can trigger increased management expenses and lead to more pronounced organizational silos. The new HP offerings bridge all the physical and virtual data center silos through management and automation. This reduces complexity and ultimately management costs.

"HP business service automation software helps us eliminate manual, error-prone tasks by automating server lifecycle management, including provisioning multiple operating systems, software installation, deployment of patches, configuration management and audits," said Ron Cotten, senior manager IT OSS Engineering, Level 3 Communications, a leading international provider of voice, video, and data communications services. "With HP Server Automation, we are able to patch over 1800 servers in 24 hours, which helps us reduce scheduled downtime."

The updated HP business service offerings help you:

· Increase administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a common dashboard.

· Reduce the risk of downtime with HP Network Automation, which for the first time gives the network administrator control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.

· Provision the right amount of storage to keep applications performing properly without overspending on excess storage with HP Server Automation, the first solution in the industry that gives server administrators this capability.

· Reduce problem resolution times with HP Storage Essentials Performance Edition by quickly identifying, troubleshooting and reporting performance metric related trends in physical and virtual environments.

“To make virtualization cost effective, customers must minimize operating expenses and have seamless management of infrastructure silos,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of Product Marketing, Software & Solutions, HP. “Our newly enhanced HP business service offerings help customers manage all aspects of the physical and virtual application infrastructure to unlock the true promise of virtualization.”

HP Software Professional Services provides solution consulting services to accelerate the value of business service automation and business service management software investments.

HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials and HP Network Automation are available now. HP Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-In will be available next month.

Webinar - "The Cloud and Your Applications: What is the Impact on Application Management"

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:10:00 GMT

Date: Thursday, July 30, 2009

Time: 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern / 7:00 pm GMT Daylight Time

Are your applications doing what they are supposed to be doing? Cloud computing, tiered applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) – all add complexity and make that question more difficult to answer.

Customers are finding more business service problems. The result: customer satisfaction and retention is at risk. The good news is that despite declining budgets, you can reduce downtime, increase service levels, and improve user experience quality.

Hear EMA Research Director Julie Craig share the early results of a recent market research survey. You’ll also hear from HP Product Marketing Manager Amy Feldman, who will share customer best practices and success stories.

HP Software Universe - Mainstage Robin Purohit

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:19:00 GMT

After a break Mainstage split into a Business Intelligence session and a Business Technology Optimization (BTO) session, I went to the later hosted by Robin Purohit, vice president and general manger, Software Products, HP Software & Solutions

Here are some bits I found interesting:

There are 15M virtual servers now and it is expected to double in 2 years.
Three key areas of change IT will see are: virtualization, SaaS and Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 screws up a lot in management, HP is building Web 2.0 compatibility into BTO tools.
Dataprotector, monitoring tools and mapping tools are including or working to include virtualization capability.
Service Manager and Asset Manager are now available as SaaS.
35% of flash apps violate Adobe best practices. HP released a testing tool which you can download for free called SWFScan. The same technology is built into some of HP’s BTO products. Customers can also do a free trial of our scanning SaaS.
One customer cut $5M in costs just in automating incidents with HP Operations Orchestration.
HP Software recently announced a suite of software for operations of Blackberry implementations. See HP and RIM Announce Strategic Alliance to Mobilize Business on BlackBerry for more details.
HP Software is publishing configuration management best practices later this month.
Brian Byun VP Global Alliances from VMware came on stage and announced announced an expanded partnership with HP to jointly develop software to manage VMware hypervisor technology. Denise Dubie at Network World wrote HP, VMware team to manage virtual servers.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09. Search Twitter for #HPSU09.

HPITOps – Covers BSM, ITFM, ITSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

HP Software Universe – Mainstage Andy Isherwood

Michael_Procopio — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:57:00 GMT

Andy Isherwood VP, Support & Services kicked off Mainstage.

There are four key areas shown in the picture above. HP announced this week its IT Financial Management offering. Andy likened ITFM to an ERP system for IT. Information Management magazine wrote an article on HP ITFM.

HP has had offerings in IT Performance Analytics and IT Resource Optimization for awhile. HP Cloud Assure was announced was announced in May 2009, HP Unveils “Cloud Assure” to Drive Business Adoption of Cloud Services

Some key points from his opening remarks:

Prepare for coming out of the recession when cutting costs and innovating.
Best in class means being good at all four - aligning to the business, taking out costs, increasing efficiency and consolidation.
Jetblue, Altec and T-Mobile were the winners of the HP Software Award of Excellence.
As an example of the quick ROI companies can get, Altec produced 10% application downtime reduction, 20% faster response time, 15% increase in customer satisfaction and a 300% improve application transaction time in 6 months.
Last year we were HP Software, this year HP Software and Solutions. This was the combining HP Software with HP Consulting and Integration. The net result increased our delivery options. In addition to offering software for in-house use, HP now has EDS, SaaS and continues with it Partners
HP SaaS business is seven years old this year and has 650 customers.

You can read other coverage of HP Software Universe in the ITOpsBlog. There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow:

HPITOps – Covers BSM, ITFM, ITSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

as well as the Twitter hashtag #HPSU09

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

Monitoring your cloud computing as easy as calling an airport shuttle

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:15:00 GMT

HP made an announcement about new cloud computing management capabilities today: HP Unveils "Cloud Assure" to Drive Business Adoption.

HP currently offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for individual management applications such as HP Business Availability Center (BAC) and HP Service Manager primarily for intranet and extranet applications.

HP Cloud Assure helps customers validate:

Security – by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorized access.
Performance – by making sure cloud services meet end-user bandwidth and connectivity requirements and provide insight into end-user experiences. This helps validate that service-level agreements are being met and can improve service quality, end-user satisfaction and loyalty with the cloud service.
Availability – by monitoring cloud-based applications to isolate potential problems and identify root causes with end-user environments and business processes and to analyze performance issues. This allows for increased visibility, service uptime and performance.

HP Cloud Assure provides control over the three types of cloud service environments:

For Infrastructure as a Service, it helps ensure sufficient bandwidth ability and validates appropriate levels of network, operating system and middleware security to prevent intrusion and denial-of-service attacks.
For Platform as a Service, it helps ensure customers who build applications using a cloud platform are able to test and verify that they have securely and effectively built applications that can scale and meet the business needs.
For Software as a Service, it monitors end-user service levels on the cloud applications, loads tests from a business process perspective and tests for security penetration.

A diagram showing the differences in the services is at Cloud Computing Basics.

In the end it doesn't matter where the service is; you need to be sure it is available and performing to expectations. Cloud Assure provides the capability in a way that is very agile. You say "I need this service monitored" and it is monitored. Its just like calling for an airport shuttle -- you call, they show up.

For Business Availability Center Michael Procopio, product manager HP Problem Isolation.