Lessons Learned from Migrating BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0 - Part 1: Background

One of my recent clients is the largest municipal healthcare organization in the country consisting of hospitals, nursing facilities, treatment centers, and community clinics. I have helped them implement BMC Event Manager (BEM), BMC PATROL, BMC Portal, and integrate monitoring tools from other vendors with BEM.

We run 9 pairs of BEM cells, 2 instances of IBRSD, 2 instances of bii4P3, 2 instances of IIWS, and 2 instances of BMC Event Adapters to process 12,000 events from 7 different monitoring tools and generate 800 automated Remedy tickets per day. I refer our architecture as 'cell cloud' because this robust and flexible event processing service is hosted by servers located in different data centers, on different operating systems, and even based on different versions of BEM releases for a while. Every component in the cloud is configured as seamless high availability at application level and all events to the cloud are buffered with no down time and no transaction loss to meet the highest business requirements by hospitals. Our event processing is based on 'cell extension' technology that I made extensive customization to the out-of-box cell knowledge base. By eliminating policies and standardizing event processing with dynamic data tables, our BEM implementation is powerful, flexible, and easy to maintain.

Being a large BMC customer in healthcare industry, we have been encouraged by BMC to migrate to BPPM. And we were constantly invited by BMC to attend BPPM briefings, roadmaps, demos, webinars, and Q&A sessions. Prior to BPPM 9.0, we participated in extensive evaluations on both BPPM 8.1 and BPPM 8.5. We have given BMC extensive feedback on the limitations in BPPM that had been holding us back from migrating to BPPM.

When we finally made a decision to migrate our BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0, our primary objective is to preserve all the scalability, performance, flexibility, and high availability in BEM 7.4. We are so proud that our 'cell cloud' technology survived emergency data center failover during Hurricane Sandy with no down time. We don't want to compromise any of these capabilities when upgrading to BPPM 9.0.

In the next few posts, I will share my experience and the lessons learned from migrating BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0. Your comments are greatly appreciated.