Data centre inventory tools have come around again? Yup, they have

BMC's betting that despite decades of lecturing about the importance of accurate inventories of your servers and networks, you haven't learned the lesson and are still losing tin and VMs in your bit barns.

This time around the company feels it's not entirely your fault: now that we're all doing automation and spinning up virtual machines – on-premises or off - without conscious thought, it's little wonder that we can't keep track of every single server or the electro-boxen in-between. Let's not forget, also, those rigs that line-of-business managers bought without really explaining them to IT but which nonetheless occupy racks and touch networks.

All of which means – here comes the ancient lecture – you may have whole racks full of stuff you either don't know about or can't accurately describe the functions of. Which is bad news when you're asked to either map technology to business processes, or fix one.

Ancient history, yes, but BMC's betting we haven't learned from it. Hence the re-badging of ye olde Atrium Discovery and Dependence Mapping as plain old “BMC Discovery” along with a promise it's been enhanced to find 85 per cent of apps and the kit they rely on, to 85 per cent accuracy, in 15 minutes.

BMC reckons it's met organisations at which IT teams lurk, clipboards in hand, to figure out which servers belong to which app. The lurkers multiply at busy times, like Christmas, lest any unintentionally-un-monitored blinkenlights go red and threaten critical apps like digital shopfronts.

BMC's showing signs of turning around nicely, so The Register assumes it's learned from history and is now putting resources into worthwhile fields. Including, with this launch, the fact that you apparently haven't learned from history. ®