Ah, Lego®: a toy that has captivated kids of all ages, and across generations. With its assortment of colors, sizes and fun accessories like windows and people, there was no limit to what one could do with a bucket of Lego® pieces and an aptitude for mechanical engineering.
I personally loved building houses, complete with rooms and furniture, with mine. One of the coolest things about these blocks, I thought, was that, regardless of the function of each piece, they all snapped onto one another by adhering to a standard design on top and bottom. Additionally wonderful was that, any time I needed one of those really long pieces but had run out, I could easily use a couple of shorter ones to achieve the same effect. In the end, multiple combinations could achieve the same result – a beautiful example of fine Lego® architecture.
So, what does this have to do with the cloud? Well, like the Lego® product, in an ideal cloud you will be able to easily fit its pieces together. Whether dropping in monitoring and alerts, or provisioning and deploy, each piece should have a common way of fitting in with the others. A solution like BMC BSM for Cloud Computing™ is a great example of component parts coming together easily and seamlessly.
Also, think of the managed services within the cloud. Much like sitting ten kids in a room and asking each one to build a Lego® house, the details of a service such as “New Production Server” could look completely different from one enterprise to another, one business unit to another, even one administrator to another. But the flexibility to use the equivalent of any length, color or type of building block to deliver the service should also exist in a cloud solution.
And of course – let’s now consider Phurnace, a very exciting acquisition and a really cool product. Where do they fit in? Requirements for Java application deploy exist across every organization, but few products on the market can manage the automation and administration of this process, and Phurnace is one that does it superbly. In the world of Lego®, this is more than just a simple building block. This is akin to when they added electricity to their sets. Suddenly, cars drove, trains steamed, and – voila! – lights turned on in the houses.
With a strong cloud management solution already in place, BMC is capable of delivering even more powerful products with the Phurnace acquisition. We’ll electrify the cloud!
In the meantime, as for myself…I’m going to Legoland®.
