Eliminating the grunt work
Like other remote systems provisioning products, OpsWare (www.opsware.com, formerly LoudCloud) automates everything from bare server configuration (operating systems, middleware, applications) to patching and upgrading. These products come in especially handy when you have numerous servers with similar configurations that you don´t want to baby-sit for every single software installation or upgrade.
But OpsWare does it with a twist that could very well be a boon to managers of large, heterogeneous and geographically distributed data centre environments.The secret sauce in OpsWare consists of 67 software objects called Intelligent Software Modules (ISM). Each ISM is a package of information about a single instance of an enterprise operating system (eg, Solaris) or application (eg, Oracle 8i) that tracks interdependency issues between the software it represents and all of the other software with which this software may interact.
For example, the researchers in OpsWare labs have figured out all of the dependencies and issues that exist between Solaris 8, BEA´s WebLogic, Oracle 9i, and Apache. Each one of those is represented by a single ISM—and that´s just one configuration. (Imagine the myriad combinations with 67 ISMs and more on the way.)
Normally, systems administrators must figure this information out for themselves, testing different revisions and patches before finding a stable configuration where no one piece of the application stack upsets the fragile balance of a complete puzzle. OpsWare´s ISMs can manage those interdependencies.
Of course, even if OpsWare works as advertised, few if any shops would or should put an OpsWare-managed system into immediate production without testing. But at least OpsWare might be able to get you to that testing phase a lot faster than you might have been able to before.
Since patches and upgrades to one part of the application stack or another are constantly shifting the balance of stability in the stack, OpsWare tracks those updates and can transparently push the new intelligence out to the relevant ISMs at a customer´s installation to make it easier for managers to deal with those upgrades.
The management platform´s user interface is browser-based. It requires at least one copy of the OpsWare core, which can run on either Solaris or Linux. One core can manage thousands of systems, each of which must have an OpsWare agent loaded. For an investment in OpsWare to make sense, a company should have at least 100 servers to manage. Having ISMs automatically updated, requires a subscription to OpsWare´s update service, which costs thousands of dollars per ISM per month. Currently, OpsWare supports servers that run current and legacy versions of AIX, Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and NT-code-based versions of Windows.
On the application side, OpsWare has support for various versions of Apache, IIS, BEA´s WebLogic, IBM´s WebSphere, Oracle´s databases and application servers, and other products like Vignette´s Story Server and Veritas´ Cluster Server. Support for HP-UX and IBM AIX is due to ship in the next month or two.
15%
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