HP Refreshes DDMA Toolset

HP has enhanced its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) product with Content Pack 10, which gives the software the ability to discover more public and private cloud service providers. In particular, this version adds support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volumes and Snapshots, as well as private cloud services using vCloud. In addition, the company improved mainframe discovery by including iSeries discovery by Eview, along with enhancements to the Eview/390z Mainframe discovery package. Finally, the company has added functionality, as well as integration with other infrastructure applications.

"HP is adding some continued enhancements to DDMA/uCMDB that helps it keep that product as a strong solution beyond traditional configuration management database information technology to cloud environments," says Ronni Colville, VP and distinguished analyst for Gartner. "As IT organizations extend private clouds to hybrid clouds and combine that with their traditional computing, tools such as DDMA will help to discover and track an IT service or application, wherever it is. In addition, HP continues to focus on integrating both to their products, which they are not always leading with, such as Network Node Manager, and beyond HP products, such as Service-Now, Aperture and Troux."

Support for the new public cloud services means that users will now have the ability to discover Amazon public cloud services, including discovering how Amazon has configured and provisioned its environments with servers and storage elements, giving it the same visibility as it would have in its own data centers, says Jimmy Augustine, group product marketing manager, configuration management systems (CMS), operations, HP Software. The company chooses what to support based on prioritizing requirements that it hears from its current clients, he says.

The Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) service automates what can be an expensive and time-consuming manual process that can be prone to errors and may not produce an accurate report on how the data center is operating. The software lets users monitor the environment and understand the significance of an issue, such as whether a problem is affecting an email system that can wait for a few hours or an ecommerce system that needs to be up all the time. It also helps administrators perform impact analysis, such as determining what changes to approve at different times of day, he says.

Discovery capabilities have also been added for HP ServiceGuard, Glassfish open source server and VMware Datastore. In addition, integration has been enhanced to include CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS), Aperture VISTA, NNMi, Application Signature and Service-Now. Functionality has also been added to the integration of Troux. Finally, Content Pack 10 provides new features such as support for SAP JCo3, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, UCMDB to XML export and a BMC Atrium pull adapter.

Existing users get the additional functionality for no additional charge. For new users, the software starts at $30,000 for discovery of up to 100 servers, Augustine says.

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