SMARTS, BladeLogic Join To Expand Data Center Automation

In particular, the partnership enables VARs to leverage the InCharge service from SMARTS and the BladeLogic Operations Manager to automatically monitor, diagnose and repair application infrastructures. BladeLogic CEO Dev Ittycheria said this tag-team approach marks a new type of "find-and-fix" solution that solves problems virtually on its own.

"Instead of identifying and repairing network problems on a manual basis, our partnership strategy allows our customers to handle every aspect of management automatically, in a self-healing solution," he said from company headquarters in Bedford, Mass.

As Ittycheria explained it, the partnership will present a blended approach to network management that minimizes manual intervention almost entirely. First, the SMARTS InCharge information model will identify interactions between network elements and will proactively recognize service-affecting problems. This tool will calculate the potential impact of each problem on the network overall, allowing problem resolution to be prioritized in order of importance.

The InCharge system will then hand off the problem list to BladeLogic's Operations Manager, which will automate corrective action according to service-level agreements or configuration policies for compliance and security. According to Carl Coken, director of product marketing for White Plains, N.Y.-based SMARTS, this combination of fault analysis and change automation should present solution providers with the opportunity to offer dynamic application management that is both responsive and self-healing.

"Ideally, by using this solution companies will only have to issue a handful of help-desk tickets," Coken said. "If we can cut hours out of downtime by reducing the time it takes to diagnose and fix a problem, that's a significant benefit for everyone involved."

SMARTS and BladeLogic aren't the first network management vendors to add automated and self-healing capabilities to their management software. Earlier this year, IBM's Tivoli software division and Computer Associates International announced plans to add similar capabilities to their products. Hewlett-Packard also has pumped up the automated capabilities of its product lines since the spring, rolling out products such as OpenView Network Node Manager 6.4 in support of its Adaptive Management Platform initiative.

Among solution providers, reaction to the self-healing technology has been skeptical at best. "Automation is a good idea, but there is no way to make a network completely self-healing," said Arthur Tisi, CEO of @Thought, a managed service provider in White Plains. "On the very basic level, you still need [someone to decide] what to automate and when."

Despite such skepticism, Stephen Elliot, senior analyst of network and service management at IDC, predicted that automation could become among the hottest aspects of utility computing in the coming year--particularly for the channel.

"There's an entire cultural shift occurring from component management to service management," he said. "Embracing self-healing technologies is going to require a lot of change, education, and even new product architecture that channel members can be intimately involved in."