Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW), the leading provider of Data Center Automation software, today introduced Opsware System 7, the industry’s first fully integrated suite of automation software to provide application-level control and visibility by automating all domains across the data center—servers, network, storage and IT processes. This comprehensive and holistic approach eradicates many of the operational disconnects between siloed server, network and storage administration teams which have typically been the leading cause for increased costs and delays in change management, compliance management and new service rollouts. This ground-breaking release of the Opsware suite further delivers on the company’s vision for helping IT achieve the Zero-Latency Data Center—minimizing manual, error-prone operations and hand-offs between change processes that should be integrated, and empowering enterprise IT operations to achieve their objectives without delay.
“Enterprise applications are highly complex, running on numerous interconnected infrastructure components that are often located in multiple, remote data centers around the world. To date, IT has struggled to manage these applications efficiently because there has been no ready means of getting an integrated view of an application, showing how its infrastructure components relate to one another, in order to determine change impacts before changes are executed," said Tim Howes, CTO and VP of research and development at Opsware Inc. “Opsware System 7 dramatically improves the situation by delivering a comprehensive application perspective to the management of all datacenter components, including servers, networks, storage and software. This capability not only brings greater visibility and control to IT operations, but it can also enable orders-of-magnitude labor and cost savings as well as much greater predictability and accountability.”
Opsware System 7 includes Server Automation System 7, Network Automation System 7, Process Automation System 7, the new Application Storage Automation System, Visual Application Manager 7 with cross-tier service visibility, a central Operational Management Database (OMDB), and The Opsware Network real-time service. Working together, these systems identify dependencies and automate the management of changes and assess change impact between all data center infrastructure elements’ software components while providing a single view of an application. Furthermore, they automate the process hand-offs between IT groups and other IT systems to automate the entire workflow associated with every change operation across servers, networks, and storage. Opsware System 7 automates all of the necessary elements across the data center to deliver process-powered change automation, unified compliance assurance, breakthrough application-level management and unprecedented platform extensibility to support IT organizations’ custom needs.
Opsware Server Automation System 7
Server Automation System 7 is Opsware’s flagship product and the cornerstone technology in Opsware System 7. This version takes server automation to new heights with the following enhancements:
-- | Fully Integrated to Process Automation | ||
| Server Automation System 7 offers out-of-the-box integration to Process Automation System. It provides several best- practice IT workflows for change, incident, release and end to end provisioning processes; it also offers integrations to several common IT management applications. Leveraging the easy to use Process Automation System developer studio interface, customers can also easily adapt the best practice workflows to their custom needs. | |||
-- | Addition of Storage Automation | ||
| Leveraging technology the company acquired last year from Creekpath Systems, Server Automation System 7 extends its breadth of automation capabilities with integrated storage visibility and management through a new add-on product, the Application Storage Automation System. This highly-anticipated extension to the system provides application-centric visibility into the storage infrastructure, including a single point of control for managing heterogeneous storage, fabric and array resources. At a glance, IT can visually depict the server-to-storage supply chain for fast troubleshooting and impact analysis, assure compliance of the storage infrastructure and track storage utilization, providing an enterprise-wide view of storage capacity and utilization. | |||
-- | Application Visualization | ||
| Server Automation System 7 enables users to model and visualize an entire business application. Opsware's "application to infrastructure" view spans the application, physical and virtual servers, and storage and network devices, and it provides an integrated view of an application's state of compliance. Users can contextually launch automation tasks and intuitively visualize configuration changes across saved snapshots to reduce MTTR. | |||
-- | Complete Application Auditing and Compliance Management | ||
| The new version of Server Automation System provides more flexible and powerful auditing across all key software objects and relationships across Windows, Linux and Unix servers. The system is optimized for multi-team collaboration and offers a greatly enhanced Compliance Dashboard with integrated compliance reporting across OS, software, patching, and application configurations. The software also offers flexible remediation options and change drift auditing for individual servers. | |||
-- | Multi-team, Drag-and-Drop Software Provisioning | ||
| With the most flexible software provisioning in the industry, Server Automation System 7 is the only server automation solution optimized for multi-team collaboration and drag-and-drop ease of use. The system provides a powerful new policy-based model that allows experts, located anywhere, to set software management policies that can be leveraged by any administrator to ensure software is provisioned and configured accurately, thereby reducing configuration errors or inconsistency-related application performance and downtime issues. The software also extends ease-of-use through a drag-and-drop model that lets administrators easily package and sequence software packages, scripts and configurations to support software distribution to servers. | |||
-- | Extensible Platform to Build Custom Applications | ||
| Server Automation System 7 introduces the Opsware Platform Extension (OPE), which allows Opsware customers to create and deploy new custom automation applications. OPEs offer published interfaces to the Opsware data model and APIs; OPEs also provide a run-time environment for deploy custom applications, which can be developed in multiple languages. Leveraging the OPEs, Opsware customers have created multiple automation applications, including custom analytics portals, compliance dashboards and self-service provisioning applications. |
Network Automation System 7
Network Automation System 7 builds upon the software’s award-winning network change and configuration management (NCCM) capabilities in four key areas: Intelligent software analysis and remediation, network run-time compliance enforcement, next generation networking support and complete process-powered network automation. The new version continues Network Automation System’s product leadership in NCCM with a number of industry firsts, including:
- The ability to automate end-to-end network operations without the need for intensive process scripting
- The ability to automatically ensure device software stays up-to-date with the latest Cisco recommended patch levels through a capability only provided with Opsware’s solution as a result of Opsware’s strategic partnership with Cisco
- The ability to proactively detect problems using real-time policies that validate the run-time status of the network and the devices connected to it
- Support for next-generation technologies such as IPv6 and SNMPv3
- A new Network Automation System Driver Development Kit (DDK) that ensures compatibility with the latest network equipment, integrates with The Opsware Network (TON) for live security vulnerabilities and policy updates, and includes rich integration packs for third-party IT tools and applications.
Please refer to the company’s announcement on September 12, 2007 for further details regarding Network Automation System 7.
Process Automation System 7
Thoroughly integrated with both Server and Network Automation System 7, the new Process Automation System 7 provides a wealth of new capabilities, including:
- Deep bi-directional integration to other Opsware Suite 7 products allows Process Automation System to be invoked directly from within the UI for Server and Network Automation System as well as Visual Application Manager. Each Process Automation workflow can natively call server and network operational functions, enabling users to automate end-to-end data center processes across the lifecycle
- Server and Network Automation System Accelerator Packs extend out-of-the-box workflows for common server and network management tasks and strengthen support for a variety of IT processes such as virtualization, service provisioning and application promote-to-production
- Deeper enterprise support for deploying Process Automation System across distributed data centers with more built-in scalability and enterprise security features
- 1000 additional out-of-the-box workflows and operations, including ITIL Accelerator Pack to help speed time-to-value for Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) initiatives
- New integration packs provide support for management software from Microsoft and CA
- Expanded support for application servers includes TomCat, WebLogic, WebSphere and JBoss.
Please refer to the company’s announcement on August 22, 2007 for further details regarding Process Automations System 7.
Opsware System 7 is expected to be generally available in the Fall of 2007.
About Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW)
Opsware, the world’s leading IT automation company, unlocks the promise of technology by accelerating IT to zero latency. The company’s software, the Opsware System, automates the entire data center, from provisioning to patching, configuration to compliance and discovery to deployment, turning data center operations into a competitive advantage for business. Opsware’s technology is used by hundreds of companies worldwide including banks, service providers, retailers, manufacturers and Internet companies with IT environments ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of servers, network devices, storage devices and IT processes. For more information on Opsware Inc., please visit our Web site at www.opsware.com.
Opsware is a service mark and trademark of Opsware Inc. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding the benefits and capabilities of our software products. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements, including the risk that the assumptions underlying our current business strategy may change, that our experience operating as a software company is limited, and that the products may not perform as described. More information about these and other factors that could affect our business are included in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on April 13, 2007 under the headings “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and the Forms 10-Q and 8-K that we file during the fiscal year. The determination of when Opsware System 7 will be made generally available, if ever, remains the sole discretion of Opsware Inc.
Contacts:
Ken Tinsley, +1 408-212-5241 (Investors)
ktinsley@opsware.com
or
Barokas
PR for Opsware Inc.
Karli Overmier, +1 206-264-8220 (Press)
karli@barokas.com