BMC has responded to Hewlett-Packard's recent purchase of Stratavia by acquiring the latter company's rival GridApp Systems to ensure BMC's software for automating database maintenance remains on a par with HP's.

BMC announced the purchase of GridApp Friday. Financial details were not disclosed. GridApp and Stratavia sold software for automating tasks performed by database administrators, such as provisioning and patching.

BMC plans to incorporate those capabilities and more found in GridApp's Clarity suite into BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, which the vendor introduced in May. The new product takes the capabilities found in BMC's system management products and extends them to cloud operations.

BMC expects GridApp's technology to be useful in cloud infrastructures through its unique approach of using model-based automation as opposed to scripting. Database administrators define the different potential states, options and parameters. The software then uses a rules engine of more than 10,000 potential operations to perform administration tasks.

In June, GridApp released Clarity Version 6.5, which made the suite more self-service. As a result, customers have the option of using operations staff and system administrators to perform some database maintenance, as opposed to more highly paid, and scarce, database administrators.

BMC can offer GridApp for use across a broad range of systems. The Clarity suite works with most relational databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, MySQL and PostgreSQL. The software also works with the most popular clustering technologies, including Oracle Real Application Clusters, Veritas Cluster Server and Windows Cluster Server, and with all major operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Windows.

That kind of broad support is important in cloud operations of large corporations that likely have multiple databases. Customer demand for cloud infrastructure was behind BMC's launch of Cloud Lifecycle Management. At the time, BMC said it had already passed the $100 million mark in deals in which virtual machine management, a key component of cloud operations, and combined virtual and physical system management are the key element in customers' purchase decisions.

HP also had its head in the cloud when it bought Stratavia in August. The smaller vendor's Data Palette software is useful in configuring and operating servers in the enterprise private cloud, where business users will want to provision their own servers and applications. HP is incorporating parts of Data Palette into the company's Cloud Service Automation, HP's product for use in building and managing the enterprise cloud infrastructure.

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