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Opsware Announces Next Wave of Data Center Automation With Opsware System 6 Product Family

Posted on: Monday, 12 June 2006, 06:00 CDT

Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW), the leading provider of IT Automation software, today announced Opsware System 6, the first integrated family of products for comprehensive Data Center Automation. The suite represents a significant advancement in delivering Opsware's vision for automated management of whole applications within data centers. Opsware's vision spans broad application infrastructure requirements across servers, networks, software infrastructure, storage and business applications. As part of this announcement, the company today launched Opsware Server Automation System 6, which joins the already announced Opsware Network Automation System 6, Opsware Visual Application Manager, and The Opsware Network security service as major components of the Opsware System 6 product family.

Driven by the broad adoption of Internet technologies within enterprises, today's IT organizations are challenged to manage applications that operate at a scale and complexity exponentially greater than that of even 7-10 years ago. Rather than being confined to single, large servers, today's applications are distributed across the enterprise and geographic boundaries, frequently spanning many hundreds of servers, software components, network devices and storage systems. Furthermore, with the proliferation of Web services and similar technologies, applications integrate and intercommunicate with each other more than ever before, further complicating changes to any portion of the infrastructure. All of this has led to an explosion in IT costs and enormous application management complexity, with both budgets and service levels being hit hard. To address this problem, the Opsware System 6 product family automates across-the-board aspects of deploying and managing applications, and for the first time allows IT to obtain a unified picture of an application's complete presence within the enterprise. In so doing, the Opsware System 6 product family helps provide orders-of-magnitude reductions in cost and complexity while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in productivity and performance.

Several strategic advances in Opsware System 6 make these improvements and cost savings possible. These include the ability to visually view all servers, networks, applications and all their interdependencies; the ability to drive change from an interactive visual view of the environment; automated software management for complex, multi-tiered applications; instant visibility into application and infrastructure compliance; and a real-time security automation service that identifies and remediates vulnerabilities and compliance issues automatically.

"Opsware System 6 provides a new breakthrough in Data Center Automation that enables automation at the application level versus just at the infrastructure level," said Tim Howes, Chief Technology Officer at Opsware. "Today we are unveiling new products that provide deeper server and network automation, as well as the first solution to provide an integrated approach to server, software and network management including affecting change from a visual view of the environment."

"As a leading online drugstore and information site for health, beauty, wellness, personal care, and pharmacy products, we view our IT operations as mission-critical to delivering the highest levels of reliability and security to our customers," said Don Allen, Senior Director of IT Operations at drugstore.com. "Opsware's Data Center Automation software is our primary tool for providing visibility, ensuring compliance, and maintaining centralized control of our operational resources. Leveraging both their server and network automation tools, we have found it instrumental in delivering a consistent shopping experience to our online customers."

In the area of server automation, the new Opsware Server Automation System 6, available in the early second half of this year, provides key new capabilities that ease management of servers and software including:

-- Audit & auto-remediation across the full range of server and software configurations to ensure compliance with corporate and security standards

-- A Compliance Dashboard for executive-level, at-a-glance visibility into server, software and application configuration and regulatory compliance

-- Breakthrough software management capabilities that enable deployment and configuration management of complex, multi-tiered applications

-- An entirely redesigned interface to ensure easy management of large IT environments consisting of thousands of servers distributed across multiple locations

-- A comprehensive Policy Framework that enables best practice capture and standards setting across software, patches, and application configurations

-- Integration with the new Opsware Network Automation System 6 to provide visibility into dependencies between servers and network devices, automatically resolve network-server configuration mismatches, and share change history information for quick isolation of application problems

Also included in Opsware System 6 is the recently announced Opsware Network Automation System 6, Opsware Visual Application Manager and The Opsware Network security service.

-- Opsware Network Automation System 6 provides the first proactive network change and configuration management solution that focuses on preventing non-compliant changes from being propagated into the network environment.

-- Opsware Visual Application Manager is a new discovery and application mapping product that renders a complete picture of all servers, software, and network elements and their interdependencies. From this visual interactive view, IT can gain an instant in-depth understanding of the state of the environment, execute change actions and manage potential change conflicts.

-- The Opsware Network, a subscription service that provides ongoing updates of security alerts and compliance policies, has been expanded to work with Opsware Server Automation System. Previously the service only covered network devices managed by Opsware Network Automation System.

In laying out its roadmap for comprehensive Data Center Automation, Opsware defines integrated server, network and storage automation as critical to ultimately delivering complete application automation and management. By automating all critical infrastructure in the data center and the key components that power today's Web application architectures, Opsware will lead the way in enabling IT organizations to automate the management of their globally distributed applications.

About Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW)

Opsware Inc. is the world's leading IT Automation software company. The growth of the Internet is driving a shift from client/server computing to Web architecture. With this shift comes an overwhelming proliferation of servers, networking devices and applications, creating massive complexity that makes automated IT operations a necessity. Opsware automates the complete IT lifecycle and enables IT to automatically discover, provision, patch, configure, secure, change, scale, audit, recover, consolidate, migrate, and reallocate servers, network devices and applications. Over 350 of the world's largest companies, outsourcers and government agencies use Opsware to deliver this new, automated model of IT. For more information on Opsware Inc., please visit our Web site at www.opsware.com.

Opsware and all Opsware product names are service marks and trademarks of Opsware Inc. Any other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

The determination of when the Opsware Server Automation System 6 will be made available, if ever, remains at the sole discretion of Opsware Inc.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding the benefits, capabilities and availability 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 and financial results is included in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on April 14, 2006 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.

Source: Business Wire

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