Taming network complexity
Martin J. Garvey (InformationWeek)
(TechWeb) -- BMC Software Inc. is preparing new products, expected to ship next week, designed to help companies gain some ground on network complexity.
"Our performance management was never accused of being easy to use," admits David Wagner, BMC's director of enterprise performance assurance.
The vendor hopes to fix that and give mainframe users confidence to install Linux workloads without forcing the big boxes to a halt.
First, the Patrol Performance Assurance suite gets a new module, Perceive, that will present app performance to users in business terms. Next, version 3.1 of Mainview Performance Assurance will have Virtual Machine Linux support that will let companies test expected workloads on mainframes before they invest in IBM's Linux.
At Ameritrade Holding Corp., traders call the IT staff about performance more than anyone in top management does.
The Web-based financial-trading trailblazer already uses BMC Patrol products to manage much of its infrastructure. But Danny Gornell, technology architect at Ameritrade's technology group, is excited about the Perceive module he's testing. "Our traders don't want to know about server uptime or utilization," Gornell says.
"But I can get a dozen calls from them in a day and they have somebody on the line." He thinks they'll be able to install Perceive quickly, and it should cut a lot of the extra processing they do now.
Says Gornell, "It's important for us to understand the data and correlate it with business metrics that will enhance the customer experience."
