Racemi and BMC take on disaster recovery and datacenter consolidation
As organizations move their industry standard workloads into virtual environments and then host several of these "virtual servers" on physical servers, making those physical and virtual servers manageable and reliable become the challenge of the day. Racemi has teamed up with BMC to offer a solution based upon BMC Software's BladeLogic Operations Manager and Racemi's DynaCenter family of products.
Here's what they have to say about their technology
Racemi DynaCenter uses virtualization technology to automate the movement of entire server images, including operating systems, storage and network configurations and applications, to dissimilar hardware -- reducing infrastructure costs along with the time and risk that manual provisioning processes typically introduce.
“The combination of Racemi and BMC takes time sensitive tasks, like provisioning servers after a disaster or during a data center move, and allows them to be completed with greater speed and ensured reliability" said Charlie Watt, founder and chief technology officer, Racemi. "BMC’s large installed base will enable us to broaden the use of Racemi business systems portability technology and help support BMC’s vision of complete service automation."
The integration of Racemi and BMC BladeLogic Operations Manager technologies is controlled via the BladeLogic Operations Manager user interface – which directly enables the capturing and provisioning of server images. The integrated solution is available today as a BMC MarketZone product and delivered by Racemi and BMC as an additional feature within the Operations Manager interface.
More information on the BMC BladeLogic Operations Manager incorporating Racemi technology is available here, http://developer.bmc.com/ar/inote.jsp.
Snapshot analysis
Racemi and BMC Software are presenting a different take on how to go about the task of making virtual servers more highly available and more manageable. They're combining a physical/virtual management product (BladeLogic Operations Manager) with a powerful disaster recovery/backup/system portability product (DynaCenter) to create a reliable, agile computing environment.Other suppliers, such as Cassatt, Scalent Systems or Surgient are using sophisticated orchestration and automation services to move virtual servers from place to place to meet service level objectives as well as to deal with failure scenarios. These players are depending upon sophisticated orchestration software to take the place of a disaster recovery/backup/system protability product. They would say that their approach works, works well and doesn't require the lower level of software.
Racemi would point out that DR/system portability software would still be needed to meet regulatory requirements for maintaining backups and would do a much better job of dealing with hardware incompatibilities (drivers, network settings, storage settings) as workloads are moved from one vendor's hardware to another or from one location to another.
I suspect that the orchestration folks are likely to respond to this announcement by showing that their approach works as well. We'll all have to wait for their response, however.