BMC Software touts tools to boost agency productivity
Connecting state and local government leaders
"We're focused now on making agencies more productive, not just their information technology departments," Morris said. BMC officials said multiplatform products to manage application performance, availability and recovery are the drawing cards for the Defense Department, which wants to prevent incidents such as the operator error that stalled a Navy Smart Ship [GCN, Nov. 9, 1998, Page 6].
Were focused now on making agencies more productive, not just their
information technology departments, Morris said.
BMC officials said multiplatform products to manage application performance,
availability and recovery are the drawing cards for the Defense Department, which wants to
prevent incidents such as the operator error that stalled a Navy Smart Ship [GCN, Nov. 9, 1998, Page 6].
BMC Patrol event-automation software, for example, would have recognized the fact
the database buffers were filling at an exorbitant rate, which is what finally crashed the
system, said John Balena, general manager of federal operations in Bethesda, Md.
He said federal organizations pour money into RAID storage devices and parallel
processors but spend almost nothing on software to prevent application and operator errors
that cause 80 percent of system failures.
Patrol watches for and intercepts any operator error that human managers can
anticipate, he said.
Recent software releases have extended BMCs event-automation support for
enterprise resource planning to OneWorld from J.D. Edwards & Co. of Denver and to ERP
software from PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., Oracle Corp., SAP America Inc. of
Wayne, Pa., and Baan Co. of Menlo Park, Calif.
BMCs ChangeDataMove utility propagates transactional enterprise data across
multiple platforms, Morris said. The real-time utility lets users integrate old IBM VSAM,
IMS or DB2 applications with new applications at the data level, without having to change
the code.
Organizations can use the utility in lieu of hiring systems integrators to replace
programmatic interfaces, Morris said.
The utility captures transactional data changes in IBM DB2, IMS or VSAM databases, then
transforms and loads them into a mainframe, midrange or PC data warehouse.
If a transaction spans all three programsDB2, IMS and VSAMthe utility
captures and moves the changes as a single transaction.
This significantly changes the way people might think about how they integrate
with their legacy applications, Morris said.
BMC multiplatform system management utilities can analyze and predict performance
bottlenecks by modeling mixed OS/390, Unix and Microsoft Windows NT workloads via
algorithms based on queuing theory and mean variance analysis.
BMC software also can predict the performance of SAP R/3 enterprise software
applications.
In many cases, you can defer a hardware upgrade by balancing the workload,
Morris said.
Recovery utilities operate at the database level, where most logical failures and error
conditions occur, according to Morris.
Operating at the database level significantly reduces the time it takes to
recover, he said. You can do hot backups, so you dont have to take the
application away from the users while backing it up.
BMC recovery utilities perform point-in-time recovery by manipulating the database log,
Morris said.
Recovery features include the ability to back out of a specific transaction in DB2,
IMS, Oracle, Sybase, Informix and Microsoft SQL Server databases, Morris said.
A recovery manager for OS/390 can handle both file system and database recovery for DB2
and IMS data, he said.
BMC recovery utilities integrate with file backup and recovery software from Legato
Systems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., Veritas Software Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., and
IBM. BMC also offers application recovery utilities for SAP R/3.
Hewlett-Packard Co. and Baan resell BMC Patrol system management utilities. IBM will
resell BMC database backup and recovery utilities with its Adstar Distributed Storage
Manager, Morris said.
The BMC data propagation tool has interfaces to data cleansing tools from Sagent
Technology Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Informatica Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif.
Electronic Data Systems Corp., Amdahl Corp. and PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. provide
BMC-based system management services.