BladeLogic

---- BladeLogic -----
Prior to its acquisition by BMC in 2008, BladeLogic provided data center automation solutions for IT organizations

BladeLogic's data center automation solutions enable a state where dynamic policies that link people, management tasks, and configuratoin datat drive the automation optimization of the IT infrastructure, creating a highly agile, business-driven IT environment

With the rise of virualization in the data center and the growing complexity of managing heterogeneous data center environments, both vendors are aiming to help enterprise customers
lower operational costs.

The company offers products to address the lifecycle of data center management using an integrated solution of provisioning, change, administration and compliance across server and application environments.

Single point of configuration and management,firmware,connectivity,health of all the resources
combine the benefits of the bladelogic automation technology

hypervisor and application mangement, datacenter networks ethernet and fiber channel
with Bladelogic it is very coherent way to manage the systems

Bladelogic server automation suite drives data center efficiency by helping you manage, control and enforce configuation changes. you can implement a policy-based server automation
solution for managing your business applications.

Provisioning - Perform bare-metal provisioning on new servers and re-provision operating systems
Configuration - Provision, patch, configure and manage heterogeneous servers according to policies
Compliance - Measure and demonstrate compliance with internal and external standards and regulations
Virtualization - Manage your physical and virtual environments from a unified management platform

Quite commonly, the provisioning, configuring and maintenance of such a large number is a challenge, resulting in an increased complexity of data centre management. It's understandable that IT managers struggle to find the right tools to automate the administration process

What is compliance ?
Adhering to a set of standards or regulations by maintaining a desired state

Two types of systems compliance
- Regulatory Compliance
- compliance is maintained against an external "secure" standard
- Objective is to eliminate instrusions and project sensitive data
- Compliance with Regulatory Requirements (FISMA, PCI, HIPPA, SOX etc)
- Example: Center for internet Security (CIS) Security Checklists
- Operational Compliance
- Compliance is maintained against an internal configuration standard
- Objective is to reduce configuration variance and achieve best-practices
- Example: Operating System Baseline

Having said that...
Compliance - Top pain areas !!
- Constant changes driven by business demands
configuration inevitably drift over time
- Manual Process
- Enforcing compliance is a very laborious and time consuming
- Requires domain experts to implement compliance policies
- Regulatory Compliance
- SOX, PCI, FISMA etc poses even greater challenge
- Tremendous pressure of demonstrating consistent compliance
- Heavy penalties for non-compliance

Rules-based Compliance with BBSA
- Determines whether a component satisfies compliance rules
- Provides more flexibility than simple valid/invalid auditing
- Enables the testing of an asset for multiple values, not just one value
- Always involves using BladeLogic Components
Examples
- Verify that a password is greater than a minimum length
- Verify that at least one of several anti-virus programs is installed and running
- Verify that a host file entry has an IP address that fails within a specific range of values
- Exceptions can be documented when there are valid reasons why a condition is not met.
- Perform remediation and reporting

The Compliance Lifecycle
Define the policies
Audit against those policies
Document Exceptions
Remediate findings
Report compliance

Provision and Configure
Addressing the pain of configuration Management

Applications - Package Promote
Build - Provision Certify
Operations - Patch Configure
Security - Scan Remediate
IT Infrastructure

--
Provision and Configure
Addressing the pain of Configuration Management
CONTROL --- CHANGE --- COMPLIANCE
Application
Middleware
Database
Infrastructure
OS

Advance way of management
Busniess application ---------- Business Services ------------- Business Process

Automate deployments and changes across physical, virtual and cloud environments, and enable continuous compliance across your data center infrastructure

- Reduce costs
Eliminate costly and ineffective manual processes
- Reduce Risk
Enforce compliance and configuration standards
- Improve Service Deployment
Enable rapid service provisioning with consistency
- Accelerate Time-to-Value
Effectively build and manage virtualized and cloud-based resources

Example
Service name: Online Pizza Ordering System
Functional Components
- Web Server
- Database Server
- Application

Production
load-balancer
3 hosts
firewall
database