BladeLogic Rolls out the Industry's Most Advanced Data Centre Automation Platform with the Availability of Release 7; Next-Generation Architecture Offers Breakthrough Capabilities in Operational Efficiency, Service Quality & Compliance Assurance

BladeLogic, Inc., the world's leading provider of data
centre automation software, today announced the availability of
BladeLogic Release 7, the industry's most advanced suite of data
centre automation software solutions. BladeLogic Release 7 is the
first and only data centre automation platform that enables multiple
IT departments to cohesively manage, control and enforce changes to
applications and their underlying infrastructure. This capability is
delivered through a next-generation architecture called Synchronous
Management(TM).
IT organisations have enabled a new generation of enterprise
applications based on today's distributed computing architecture in
which substantial components of the application and related services
are provisioned on servers located in one or multiple data centres.
Because of the sheer number and complexity of these diverse software
components, a number of different IT groups with very specialized
skills - such as systems administrators, application developers,
database administrators, security engineers, application support
specialists and a variety of other operational staff - have to be able
to easily work together to effectively manage and support these
applications.
However, the fundamental problem with today's data centre
automation tools is that they focus only on automating a set of
management tasks performed by a particular group in isolation, and do
not take into consideration inter-related management activities
performed by different groups that affect the infrastructure and
applications being managed. As a result, an inordinate amount of time,
effort and money is spent reconciling actions performed by one group
with the actions of another. The inherent conflict created by this
piecemeal approach results in diminished service quality, high
compliance and security risks, and higher operating costs.
With Release 7, BladeLogic's Synchronous Management architecture
offers a new management paradigm by allowing organisations to
synchronise all configuration management activities across disparate
IT teams performing different management actions. By enabling the use
of dynamic, multi-functional policies that link specific people and
teams to explicit infrastructure components and the precise management
actions they are authorized to perform, BladeLogic ensures
provisioning, configuration management and compliance management
actions are not made in isolation, but in context of the overall needs
of the business. The end result is dramatically improved IT service
quality, reduced operational costs, better compliance to policies and
greater flexibility to respond to an ever-increasing rate of change in
the data centre.
"After reviewing and testing the major configuration management
solutions, we selected BladeLogic Release 7 due to its full range of
server and application management functionality and its ability to be
easily adopted into our environment," said Chris McDaniel, Director of
IT Operations, Rearden Commerce. "Since deploying BladeLogic Release
7, we now have consistent server and application builds and clear
visibility to what has been installed on each server, helping Rearden
Commerce to improve our operational processes and maintain compliance
with corporate, security and regulatory polices."
In Release 7, BladeLogic introduces many new improvements to
BladeLogic Operations Manager(TM), the company's flagship product, and
introduces BladeLogic Application Release Manager(TM), a dedicated
application release management solution. BladeLogic Application
Release Manager streamlines the application packaging and promotion
process across development, test and production environments to ensure
timely and accurate application releases. The result is expedited
delivery of new business applications, less production issues with
updates to existing business applications and higher availability for
all mission critical business applications.

Key Highlights of BladeLogic Release 7

BladeLogic Synchronous Management Architecture
Unified Policy for Synchronous Management

-- Dynamic, multi-functional policies that synchronise all
provisioning, configuration and compliance management
activities across different teams, applications and related
infrastructure

BladeLogic Application Release Manager
Application Release Management

-- Standalone application release management solution to
streamline application packaging and promotion for complex
J2EE and .Net applications

-- Hierarchical application environment models to support
run-time parameterization of environment-specific
configurations

-- Application promotion rules driven by access controls to
ensure consistency in environments and release versions and
eliminate errors associated with unauthorized package changes
and promotions

BladeLogic Operations Manager
Compliance

-- Sophisticated rules-based auditing for compliance to provide
more accurate and granular audit results and improved
visibility

-- Holistic IT compliance audits that integrate security, build,
operational and regulatory policies with automated remediation
and exception handling

Access Control

-- Configuration-level role-based access control to reduce
security risks associated with granting too much privilege and
improve visibility into administrator activity

-- Built-in access control policies based on IT governance best
practices such as Control Objectives for Information and
Technology (COBIT) to enable IT organisations to fulfill
regulatory and governance requirements

Best Practices Content

-- Out-of-the-box security, build, configuration and process
policies based on best practices such as Centre for Internet
Security (CIS), National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), National Security Agency (NSA) and IT Infrastructure

Library (ITIL)
-- CIS-certified security compliance policies

"Unlike other solutions in the market, BladeLogic started with a
clean sheet of paper to develop software designed to specifically
address today's enormous challenges in managing the server and
application infrastructure in the data centre," said Dev Ittycheria,
president and CEO, BladeLogic. "With its Synchronous Management
architecture, the breadth of sophisticated features and proven success
in the field, BladeLogic Release 7 is the most advanced data centre
automation platform in the industry today."
For more information, please contact BladeLogic at 781-257-3500 or
sales@bladelogic.com.

About BladeLogic

BladeLogic is the world's leading provider of next-generation data
centre automation software with the largest installed base of Global
2000 and other leading customers, including such organisations as
Capgemini, E*Trade, Expedia, HSBC, Lockheed Martin, priceline.com,
Time Warner, VeriSign, Virgin Mobile and Walmart.com. BladeLogic's
award-winning suite of enterprise-class data centre automation
solutions enables organisations of any size to achieve continuous
configuration compliance across large-scale, distributed server and
application environments, resulting in dramatically reduced data
centre operating costs, improved service quality, increased
efficiencies, and enhanced compliance and security. BladeLogic is a
privately held company headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA.
For more information, please visit www.bladelogic.com.