The Big Four of Third-Party Management Vendors
BMC Software, CA, HP, and IBM are the top four network and systems management vendors. They all provide solutions for a wide range of platforms and technologies and are scalable for true enterprise application—using these vendors' products to manage tens of thousands of heterogeneous nodes isn't out of the ordinary. Products that have this level of coverage and scalability can be expensive to implement and require expertise to manage. However, the big four vendors are working to make their products easier to implement and use through enhancements such as out-of-the-box automation and refined installation processes.
Nevertheless, a comprehensive enterprise-level management solution isn't something that you install and start using in a day. HP and IBM hold a slight advantage for large implementations because they have internal consulting groups to assist with customer installations. CA and BMC Software use external systems integrators to help customers with their implementations.
Because these vendors provide management umbrellas that cover all management activities within an organization, open standards and integration tools are imperative. For example, a large company might use several products from two or more of these vendors to manage various applications. The goal for such products is to provide a centralized operations center to which all events from the disparate management applications bubble up. The big four vendors understand the crucial need to adhere to standards and develop ways to interoperate with one another. Although the vendors don't go out of their way to advertise that their solutions work with their competitors' products, interoperability is developing behind the scenes.
In terms of product delivery, the big four take a similar approach: You purchase the management modules you need one by one and plug them into your overall solution. Some differences exist in the vendors' approaches to marketing the integration components of their offerings, however. Although some vendors' components can function on a standalone basis without relying on an underlying framework, a full-blown centralized management implementation is functionally the same from one vendor to the next. Nevertheless, to appear unique, vendors have coined different terms for their centralized management infrastructures.
BMC Software's PATROL
BMC Software's PATROL solutions are capable of functioning with or without an encompassing management umbrella, although they integrate fully with the company's centralized management tool, PATROL Enterprise Manager. PATROL solutions use agents that run on managed systems. The agents gather basic system data as well as data from any installed Knowledge Modules (i.e., modules geared toward monitoring and managing a specific application or area of functionality). For example, an agent on a managed server would gather information from the PATROL for Microsoft SQL Server Knowledge Module, which delivers in-depth SQL management capabilities.
PATROL's concentration on infrastructure- and service-level management has led BMC Software to forsake CCM capabilities, such as asset management and software distribution. Third-party applications are available that can integrate with the PATROL architecture and provide these capabilities.
BMC stresses what it calls the sliding scale of manageability, which refers to the various levels of management that the servers in your infrastructure require. For example, although you'll want to manage all aspects of the servers that host your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) applications, on a simple file server, you might need to manage just the integral system components, such as memory, disk space, and processor use. A more granular approach to management is often more expensive, so BMC Software offers PATROL Express for lighter management applications.
Over the past few years, BMC has spent a lot of time and effort acquiring and integrating key management technologies into its portfolio. As a result, the company has slipped somewhat from its previously dominant position. However, it still has a firm grasp on managing very large environments and is making its product more adaptable to smaller customers. And the company's recent efforts to strengthen its product line will make BMC Software stronger and better able to compete on a feature-by-feature basis.
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