Applications

The Logic is Mightier than the Blade

Sometimes the best ideas for a new business come from the one you're running now. That was certainly the case when four colleagues from ASP Breakaway Solutions founded infrastructure software provider BladeLogic.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 27, 2004]

Vane Loiselle is vice president of marketing at Waltham, Mass.-based BladeLogic, with a job title that can mean anything from functionary to visionary. But Loiselle is also, with three others, a co-founder of the company. So consider him the chief evangelist.

We're confused about why a company called BladeLogic is all software and no equipment, but he explains the name easily enough. "Our view is that, over time, all devices will be considered blades. We provide the logic to manage the blades," he says.

The ideal is that software can be located anywhere in the world, inside the enterprise or outside of it, but be part of one seamless service. "Our software treats all servers as blade servers, whether they're regional or central."

Servers can be completely different items, but managed centrally, by one application. "It simplifies the management of all server devices irrespective of OS. The ability to manage the variations of server infrastructure, such as Apache, Tomcat, and custom apps, in a one to many relationship allows you to do things that would be difficult to do manually."

The goal is enabling the new new network. "The holy grail for everybody in IT is utility computing, or on-demand computing. If you look at it, there are four components:

1. Monitoring or measuring the applications and infrastructure
2. Taking action based on that input to make changes if needed
3. Metering for billing and chargeback
4. A policy engine for SLAs that will, for example, provision more servers if a website is near capacity

We provide items two and four, an enhanced policy engine."

The company calls the software the BladeLogic Operations Manager.

BladeLogic's four co-founders had been part of Breakaway Solutions, which filed for Chapter 11 during September of 2001. Loiselle says they realized that there was no solution that could take an application through every stage from modeling through provisioning to compliance.

He stresses the importance of compliance. "On average, 78 percent of problems are configuration problems. They are the result of manual error, not problems with hardware or software. BladeLogic allows you to automate the entire release management process."

The holy grail, he says, is to make provisioning an application "like turning a knob." For example, say the IT department decides to use ASP Salesforce.com as its CRM application, but keep the supply chain application in house.

The idea is to break down each application into components consisting, yes, of blades in specific configurations. So, say you're actually doing CRM in house. CRM is IIS (the webserver) plus Oracle (the database) plus Windows (the OS). BladeLogic can test the configuration, provision it, and add servers to the database as necessary.

You also need to be able to undo stuff, he says. "It's a transaction-based process, because you want to be able to roll back. Other solutions are brute force solutions that simply redeploy one image to manay servers."

A recently announced customer is Redwood Shores, Calif.-based iPass. Known to ISPs as a hotspot infrastructure company, iPass serves mobile data customers of all kinds. It has 11 international data centers, and, says Loiselle, has deployed BladeLogic to about 80 percent of its servers.

As long as you have plenty of servers and complex apps, BladeLogic might work for you. You might not even have to be as big as iPass, which claims "over 20,000 dial-up, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet broadband access points around the globe."

— End