For our fictional company, which has a midrange of standards defined across its Linux, Windows and VMware environment, we estimate a five-to-six-week effort to compare costs and benefits, define requirements, construct a gap analysis and create baseline metrics. This task will include one full-time business/technical analyst and a multitude of internal stakeholders, totaling about one and a half FTEs. A consultant can also be brought in. Based on an FTE salary of $75,000 and $7,000 per week for consulting, a six-week effort comes to $54,978. While both BladeLogic and Opsware have developed extensive methodologies to support these efforts as part of presales, enterprises may find it worthwhile to have a consultant on hand to help vet vendor claims.
Architecture And Infrastructure
Once the preliminary steps have been achieved and you've decided on a vendor, the next step is deployment.
BladeLogic Operations Manager and Opsware SAS require agents on each server. They also mandate management servers to configure and control those agents. With three geographically diverse data centers, our fictional company, InterBank, will deploy one management server per location, in addition to placing an agent on each of its 1,200 physical servers and 25 virtual servers. BladeLogic charges $1,400 per server agent; Opsware, $1,200.
Opsware and BladeLogic presented significantly different pricing models for the software to manage their agents. BladeLogic doesn't charge for management servers. Opsware charges $100,000 per management server, meaning it will bill InterBank for both the management server and the agents that will sit on each server being managed. However, because Opsware's per-agent cost is $200 less than BladeLogic's, Opsware's pricing becomes more attractive as server volume increases. BladeLogic's structure is more compelling for small environments.
