A Comprehensive Approach to Configuration Management

    Solutions for all aspects of the data center automation lifecycle

    Hundreds to thousands of servers, storage, software components, and network devices. A heterogeneous, complex and geographically distributed environment. New technologies like virtualization, blades, VoIP and SOA. All constantly changing. Sound familiar?

    Unfortunately, this is the reality of today’s data center. And it results in some very real challenges for companies like yours. Consider this:

    • Do you know exactly how many servers, network devices, and storage infrastructure you have?
    • Are you sure you know about all the changes in your production environment?
    • How long would it take you to provision a hundred new servers? Rollout a critical network security update?
    • Are all your systems’ configurations in line with your policies and standards?

    Opsware’s Integrated Approach to Configuration Management

    There are many products that simply track changes. There are many tools that automate specific tasks like provisioning or patching. But until now, there hasn’t been a solution that both tracks change and automates change.

    Opsware System 6 is a comprehensive Configuration Management solution that enables you to discover and track changes, enforce configuration standards, and automate routine tasks such as upgrading software or deploying a new server. And Opsware covers the entire application infrastructure—servers, network devices, and storage—providing you one configuration management solution for your entire data center. By bringing change tracking and change automation together, Opsware enables you to reduce downtime due to bad changes, eliminate security holes due to inconsistencies, and improve efficiency by rolling out change quicker and easier.

    Discovers and Assesses Current Infrastructure

    Before you can automate configuration management, you must have an accurate understanding of what makes up the IT infrastructure. Opsware immediately discovers the servers and software, network devices and storage behind your applications and creates a real-time, interactive map of the environment, complete with interdependencies.

    Tracks and Manages Change.

    Tired of losing valuable minutes or hours troubleshooting a problem only because you did not know what had changed in the environment? Opsware automatically detects all configuration and asset changes across your entire data center, regardless of whether the change was made through Opsware or directly to the infrastructure.

    Provides a Complete Audit Trail.

    Opsware stores a complete historical audit trail of changes across the infrastructure, including the critical ’who, what, when and why,' so you can immediately identify the reason and purpose for specific settings. Besides improving security and compliance, this insight into the data center dramatically improves the mean time to repair, mean time between failure, and departmental enterprise-wide communication.

    Provisions, Patches, Upgrades, and Updates.

    Chances are your operations team spends countless hours on everyday tasks like provisioning, patching, updating configurations, and deploying software updates. Opsware automates these time-consuming and error-prone tasks, from bare-metal provisioning of servers and network devices to deployment of patches and updates to changing parameters in a configuration file, enabling each of your administrators to manage more devices at a higher quality.

    Enforces Standards.

    Many security holes and errors are introduced because there was no easy way to compare changes to a defined standard. Opsware makes this easy by completely automating the enforcement of standards in the data center. With Opsware, changes are automatically checked against policy-based standards and any issues are immediately identified.