Opalis Unveils Process Automation Solution for Virtualized Environments

Combination of Virtualisation and Run Book Automation Accelerates Improvements in Enterprise IT Efficiency and Service Delivery

Opalis Software, the Run Book Automation (RBA) market leader, today announced a powerful new virtualisation management solution as the latest extension to its rich catalogue of automated IT processes. Opalis Process Catalogue for Virtualisation gives the Global 2000 a market-leading solution for optimising management of virtualised environments, helping IT organisations control virtual management costs and improve service quality.

Virtualisation of IT environments offers tremendous benefits for large- and medium-sized enterprises, yet at the same time creating new management challenges. While virtualisation may bring dramatic improvements in utilisation, it can also significantly impact operations, security, and management processes, resulting in VM sprawl, security exposures, and configuration chaos. Many IT processes may be impacted by virtualisation, from approval and provisioning of new virtual servers to on-going maintenance, including patching, compliance, and incident handling. Current manual processes already challenged in a pre-virtual (physical) IT infrastructure simply cannot cope with the increased speed, scale, and complexity of virtualised environments.

Opalis – Maximising the Benefits of a Virtualised Environment
Today’s siloed IT infrastructure consists of a variety of heterogeneous management tools which have little or no interoperability between them and are contributing to the complexity of managing IT services. This has resulted in an increase in management costs and inhibits IT from delivering services that span multiple departments. As such, IT executives are seeking the capability to integrate IT silos such as monitoring, provisioning, virtualisation, and service desk, and at the same time to automate cross-functional processes around incident, change, and configuration management.

Opalis’ award-winning RBA solutions provide these capabilities and increases efficiency in IT operations by orchestrating, integrating, and automating the end-to-end IT process into a workflow environment. Opalis offers solutions in both virtualised and non-virtualised IT infrastructures to alleviate these challenges for Global 2000 companies, enabling them to better control costs and drive complexities out of IT operations processes. This is achieved through a scalable architecture, broad capabilities to automate IT workflows and processes, an easy-to-use administrator interface for modification of pre-existing workflows or creation of new ones, and extensive integration capability out-of-the-box to hundreds of IT management and provisioning products.

Opalis Process Catalogue for Virtualisation Delivers Automated Services for IT
The Opalis Process Catalogue for Virtualisation includes specific IT services available to enable customers to automate as they deliver IT services in the following areas. All of these automated processes are both ITIL v2 and ITIL v3 compliant.

• Incident management – Determines root cause (physical/virtual server) of errors and automates diagnostic procedures and corrective actions
• Change management – Commissions/decommissions virtual servers automatically and across the provisioning lifecycle in response to errors or service requests
• Configuration management – Enables server compliance and automates patching, software development, and server audit remediation across online/offline virtual servers
• Maintenance – Automates virtual server and file clean-up for expired images
• Backup and Recovery – Automates backup and recovery procedures.

“Technologies such as VMware provide an outstanding solution for ‘how’ to instantiate a virtual machine while Opalis provides the ‘why and when’ by leveraging existing management tools to orchestrate an automated workflow between event triggers, change request, provisioning, CMDB, asset management, and compliance reporting, as well as the ability to reverse the process when the useful lifecycle of the virtual machine has expired,” said Charles Crouchman, CTO for Opalis. “Virtualisation, coupled with process automation for the lifecycle management of virtual environments, represents the most compelling route to value for enterprises employing virtualisation in the production data centre.”

The Opalis Process Catalogue for Virtualisation is available in Q4 of 2007. Customers can view a demonstration at Opalis booth #1222 during VMworld 2007 in San Francisco, September 11-13th.