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Wednesday, April 16, 2014

BMC ADDM Goes Big


New technology trends are changing the scale at which IT operates. As enterprises move forward with their initiatives in Cloud, mobile, Big Data and the Internet of Things, managing their ever-expanding and dynamic environments becomes a bigger challenge. The challenges and demands are many, including the exploding number of “things” that must be managed, the accelerating velocity of changes due to the frequency of updates and new applications, widely dispersed locations and the demand for timely IT responsiveness to business needs.

Most of the attention for Cloud, mobile, Big Data and the Internet of Things focuses on the “latest and greatest” innovations and applications. However, the success of these new technologies hinges on the ability to keep them up and performing as expected. And as IT infrastructures increase in scale, IT management systems must also scale and adapt to keep up with the expansion. IT Operations require fresh, accurate data to optimize their effectiveness, decisions and efforts in these increasingly dynamic environments. However, many IT staffs have had to make tradeoffs in the frequency of collecting its discovery data for the sake of balancing the enterprises’ needs of resources, costs and time. The latest release of BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM), version 10, is delivering capabilities to help IT address these challenges.               
Big Discovery
BMC is calling its new increased scalability of ADDM, Big Discovery. ADDM is deployed as a virtual appliance, which can scale horizontally by clustering as many virtual appliances as needed for discovery performance and speed. For ease of management, the cluster is managed collectively as a single appliance and fault tolerance can be used for reliability.

In conjunction with BMC ADDM’s scalable NoSQL graph database architecture, the new clustering capability enables ADDM to scale its discovery and increase the scan speed, which some customers have reported as much as a 50% improvement with only two cluster members.
The effect of this faster, scalable discovery enables IT staffs to perform discoveries more frequently and more broadly to ensure that they are making operational decisions on fresh and accurate data. The performance enhancements enable IT to maximize their discovery by capturing more data in shorter scan windows, to keep up with the needs of dynamic environments for cloud and mobile. With these new capabilities, customers can minimize the effects on IT infrastructure data accuracy from limitations of time, resources and cost.   

Time to Value
In ADDM release 10, BMC also focused on the time to value by simplifying the deployment of ADDM. Packaged as a virtual appliance and coupled with BMC’s out-of-the-box open pattern library, ADDM is easy to deploy and the new cluster technology stays with that philosophy. During the beta, testers were observed to get clusters deployed and running in just a few minutes. They reported only leveraging the UI for creating a Big Discovery cluster and did not have to seek additional instruction.

ADDM release 10 includes other enhancements, such as a new Knowledge Management user interface, a new user interface for faster upgrades, and more.

 
Response from a beta test user:
“I can only say great stuff!   Testing in lab with scanning cluster and consolidation appliance, everything working fine so far, good performance, clustering gave me nearly 50% more speed.”
 
Roland Pocek
NTT Data
 
The Final Word
The latest release of BMC’s ADDM focuses on helping IT keep its infrastructure management data as accurate as possible, with its increased speed and scalability. At first glance, that may not be as alluring as the latest technology trends like Cloud or mobile, but the accuracy and timeliness of infrastructure data is foundational to ensuring that enterprise applications keep running and performing optimally.

Initial BMC customer reaction to ADDM release 10, seem to be positive. Although the initial reactions mention the speed and operational aspects of the new capabilities, the real benefit is that IT can rely on and put more trust in the data that they use to make decisions and do their jobs effectively and efficiently.                   

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