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Data Center AutomationLearn, resolve, and control your automated data center

REALWORLD RESULTS

Cisco Media Services reduced the time toprovision servers rom 24 hours to 20-25

minutes.

Virgin Mobile is able to deploy an entire Tibcoplatorm in just three minutes

Edmunds.com took just two days to provision95 servers down rom three months

Columbia Sportswear takes five hours tochange passwords on all their network devices

down rom 60+ every 90 days

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYIT departments have been working on automation or a long time. However, the

results have allen short o expectations. While individual areas may have good

automation, whether through point solutions or custom development, overall

processes ofen require manual tasks or significant scripting to join disparate pieces

together. As a result, IT depar tments are orced to operate in fire-fighting mode,

rushing rom emergency to emergency without time to ocus on strategic tasks and

goals. Even simple questions require significant effort and expertise to answer.

The result is a lack o efficiency in the data center, which can lead to outages and

downtime. Compliance audits ofen cover only a por tion o 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, requently working only thanks to inormal relationships. All this makes it

very hard or managers to base their decision-making on the real state o 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 o the worlds most

demanding IT organizations. BMCs Data Center Automation solutions are structured

around three undamental areas o value:

Learn:View the state o IT in real time, compare configurations to each other, and

automate repetitive configuration management tasks

Resolve:Identiy drif rom desired state, audit regularly or compliance to policies,

and remediate discrepancies automatically

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

and document the evolving state o 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 rameworks.

ARE YOU?

Trying to increase IT efficiency?

Dealing with manual tasks andisolated pockets o automation?

Considering how to connect brokenprocess and communication loops?

Worried about incomplete compli-ance coverage and remediation?

Missing a unified view o IT?

WITH BMC, YOU WILL:

Increase the efficiency o IT andreduce downtime

Deliver ull automation o recurringtasks without scripting

Close communication loops andintegrate processes

Ensure ull compliance coveragewith integrated remediation


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BUSINESS CHALLENGEAs ITs role in the business increases and demands placed on it continue to grow old model s are

alling short o satisying requirements. Where manual task s, 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 o agility, flexibility, and cost savings have made that model obsolete. Businesses expect a

rapid and reliable turnaround on requests or IT support. Complex and diverse IT inrastructures, different

teams operating without strong communications and processes, and increased requirements make

operating a data center ar rom a solved problem.

HOW BMC CAN HELPFor more than 20 years, BMC has been helping organizations around the world increase the efficienc y

and impact o IT. Working with each organizations unique user base, technology platorms, compliance

requirements, operational best prac tices, 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 rom 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 reerence database is updated or a discovery process is executed . Whats more,

because BMC Data Center Automation solutions work on actual configurations, regardless o how they are

applied, these solutions can co-exist with your existing tools or even with manual ac tions. 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 o 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 sor ts o repetitive

actions that traditionally have consumed an enormous amount o IT personnel s time.

Finally, it is necessary to deploy new configurations without requiring manual connections to each

system or new scripts or each task. Repetitive actions (add a user, edit a configuration file, change

permissions on a older, restart a service, etc.) are individually small, but together take up a significant

proportion o IT staffs time with rustrating task s that interrupt more strategic work.

THE BMC DIFFERENCE

Heterogeneous support or

all major operating systems

and virtualization platorms,

whether on- or off-premise, as

well as network equipment and

database vendors

Dynamic, ull-stack provisioning

o server, network, and database

resources

Real-time configuration visibilityat 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


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RESOLVE

The pace o change is increasing as business expectations o IT become more sophisticated and more

requent. The first s tep to change management, thereore, is to identify changes. To do so, a reerence

configuration is needed. This might be a live reerence environment, an historical snapshot o the

environment when it was in a known good state, or a policy configuration that reflects security baselines,

operational best practices, or industr y-standard policies, such as Sarbanes-Oxley or PCI. The changes

need to be identified in sufficient detail to avoid both alse positives and alse negatives.

Compliance to the desired state is a process , not an event. Even i the system start s out compliant, it

will inevitably drif rom that initial state as various manual and automated changes occur. For example,

components are restar ted or updated, users are created or deleted, patches are applied, and so on. That

means that regular audits need to be perormed against all applicable sys tems. The targets o an auditmight 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 discrepanc ies differences rom 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 br ing configurations into compliance with one click. O course,

not all configurations can or should be identical, so support or documenting temporary or permanent

exceptions is also needed. These exceptions can then be taken into account or subsequent audits,

avoiding over- or under-reporting o 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 or

routine events, without requiring manual action by IT staff. Change and maintenance windows also can be

enorced automatically, and related changes can be managed together, avoiding collisions and conflic ts.

To ensure ull coverage o 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 o IT

Avoid security breaches and

outages due to configuration

errors

Increase and document

compliance levels, avoiding

penalties


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*403704*

approved automatically according to process without slowing down execution, and

manual approvals can be implemented where necessar y, enabling a policy o approval

by exception,where only events out o 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 inormation. In the other

direction, change management can avoid automated changes colliding or overlapping

with manual changes or changes rom different tools. Mapping inrastructure to

business processes can also help in assigning priorities or security policies.

DATA CENTER AUTOMATION AND BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT

By addressing the primar y data center challenges through the automation o 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 o an integrated service management platorm. BSM manages

services, supporting applications, and inrastructure across a broad set o operating

environments rom physical inrastructure, to virtual inrastruc ture, and in the cloud.

As the BSM pioneer and market leader, BMC offers a low risk, modular approach to

implementing BSM. BMC has successully 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 o thousands o IT organizations

around the world -- rom small and mid-market businesses to the Global 100 -- rely

on BMC Sofware (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications

across distributed, mainrame, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers

cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice o ITmanagement solutions, including industry-leading Business Service Management and

Cloud Management offerings. For the our fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2012,

BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

BMC, BMC Sofware, and the BMC Sofware logo are the exclusive properties o BMC Sofware, Inc., are registered with theU.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks,service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. IBM and z/OS are thetrademarks or registered trademark o International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, orboth. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property o their respective owners. 2007, 2010, 2012 BMCSofware, Inc. All rights reserved. Origin date: 1/10

LEARN MORE

With deep roots in automation o servers,

network devices, and databases and

market-proven experience BMC can help yo

address both your immediate and long- term

data center automation goals. To learn more,

please visit www.bmc.com/automation.

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