BMC Cloud Lifecycle Manager and F5: Automated Application Delivery

I am pleased to announce that F5 has recently formalized our partnership with BMC software with a specific focus around BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle Manager.  Details on the joint solution can be found at the link below:

http://www.f5.com/products/technology/bmc-software/

 So why is a formal integration of the F5 ADC and the BMC CLM product so compelling? 

Planning:  Deploying a private or hybrid cloud entails a significant amount of planning to execute properly with BMC cloud lifecycle management, architectural components like storage, compute, hypervisors, applications and even ADCs can be pre-provisioned for applications to provide a rapid deployment and accurate information on costs. 

Deployment:  When we use terms like ‘Private Cloud’ or ‘Hybrid Cloud’ we are still talking about deploying an application and all the necessary components to ensure that application is available, fast and secure.  Through the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Manager console users will now be able to provision and manage the F5 BIG-IP LTM simplifying the overall provisioning and management of private clouds and its necessary components. 

Hybrid Cloud Management:  F5 has been a pioneer in hybrid cloud deployment and automated ‘Cloud Bursting’ solutions.  Our thought leadership in application mobility with our Long Distance Live Migration has generated tremendous buzz in the market and with our customers.  With BMC CLM, policy management, provisioning, application deployment and chargeback of both private as well as public cloud deployments will help break down data center walls and enable more flexible, cost effective application deployments allowing enterprises to provision internal IT resources to the ‘mean’ rather than ‘peak’.  This translates into a dramatic cost savings for enterprises seeking a more flexible, dynamic and adaptive IT environment. 

The initial integration between BMC CLM and  F5 is with the BIG-IP LTM utilizing secure shell and tmsh.  Over time we are looking to expand this integration to incorporate the entire BIG-IP portfolio to enable centralized provisioning of unified access, acceleration, security and GSLB.  Tighter integration using F5 iControl is also being explored so that enterprises will have greater control and flexibility in how they deploy the F5 ADC functionality to support private or hybrid clouds. 

We would like to welcome BMC to the F5 partner ecosystem and look forward to extending and enhancing our joint customer value. As always, feedback and comments are welcomed.