BMC Launches New Business Unit, New Product Lines
With the understanding that, as enterprise data continues to proliferate, it must be efficiently stored and managed, BMC Software Inc. (Houston) has announced a new business unit as well as two new lines of enterprise recovery and storage management products.
BMC's Recovery and Storage Management (RSM) business unit is charged with creating solutions that promote the central management of enterprise storage solutions, addressing management concerns for new technologies like storage area networks (SANs) and facilitating the continuous operation of customer sites threatened by power outages.
The new business unit will feature two new product lines, RESOLVE for Enterprise Storage Management and RESOLVE for Enterprise Recovery Management. Both RESOLVE product lines will be populated primarily by a number of BMC's 300 existing products, although new ones are in development, according to Kathy Taylor, senior director of marketing for BMC.
In the Storage Management line, for example, BMC plans to re-brand its existing SpaceView product to reflect the RESOLVE name. SpaceView is designed to manage capacity, performance, alerts, automation and consolidation. The AS/400 market can look forward to its own version of SpaceView, as a member of the RESOLVE brand, sometime during January 2000, according to Taylor.
Storage is getting cheaper, Taylor says, but any quantity of storage implemented must be properly managed. "Customers are centralizing storage management as a function," she adds. "SpaceView helps with this, allowing for automated responses to alerts, for example."
IT shops implementing SANs can expect IBM to provide some of the storage management software required, but other management software will be necessary to manage existing storage servers that are non-IBM. BMC sees a role for itself in five different areas of SAN management, including auto discovery, configuration, use of intelligent devices, alert generation and reporting.
"Storage shouldn't be managed in isolation," Taylor points out. "BMC manages a number of resources, so it is in a position to deliver overall management of storage and recovery."
On the Recovery Management side of the new business unit, BMC plans to focus on enabling the process of getting back up and running at "light-speed" after an outage, according to Taylor. Products in the RESOLVE for Enterprise Recovery Management line will not, however, be available to run directly on the AS/400 platform.
Addressing the significance of recovery management, Taylor says, "People don't always test their recovery systems; they test their data backup. The applications themselves are important when resuscitating a system. Application awareness is the future."
--L. Greenemeier