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Computer Associates

CA Expands Offerings for Virtualized Data Centers and Private Clouds

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CA recently announced an new strategy for optimizing IT services by improving the management of next-generation virtualized data centers and private clouds. CA’s solution for unified business service assurance and automation will involve coupling comprehensive availability and performance management for VMware vSphere 4 environments and Cisco virtualized network switches.

CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model.

CA aims to reduce the complexity of managing fast-growing, dynamic virtual and physical environments by bringing a consistent user experience across end-to-end infrastructure management. Virtualization offers impressive server consolidation-related cost savings, and customers cite the need to reduce management complexities that result from disparate tools and fragmented teams. Moreover, to benefit from hybrid cloud architectures, enterprises and service providers have to enhance network performance visibility in context of server performance.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will deliver patented event correlation and root cause analysis that reduces “noise” by suppressing symptomatic alarms. The products will also deliver patented “deviation-from-normal” proactive performance management of virtual environments that helps identify performance issues before users and services are impacted. In addition, they are designed to deliver live interactive reporting for troubleshooting, as well historical trend reports for capacity planning reports.

CA’s object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

An enhanced automated discovery of the integrated physical and virtual network and systems environment will minimize manual efforts and help ensure an accurate understanding of the virtualized infrastructure.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will also detect and track VMware VMotion migrations, dynamically updating the object model to reflect the most current state of the infrastructure. This feature is designed to provide up-to-date and real-time views of the integrated physical and virtual infrastructure without manual intervention.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager’s patented Inductive Modeling Technology RCA is being extended to isolate faults to physical servers and intelligently suppress symptomatic alarms on virtual machines. This will deliver only actionable alerts to IT operations, while correlating symptomatic alarms to the root cause and identifying virtual entities impacted by physical infrastructure failures.

Customers will be able to gain even more business value by using CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager in conjunction with CA Spectrum Automation Manager, the core of CA’s powerful business-driven automation solution. The ability to utilize real time inputs from CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager to dynamically provision and de-provision physical and virtual assets will be instrumental in customers’ efforts to increase business agility, service quality and control, as well as reduce risk and human error, minimize costs, and improve IT efficiency.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CA, Computer Associates, private cloud, private clouds, unified business service assurance and automation, virtualisation, virtualization, virtualized data center, virtualized data centers

CA Buys Large Part Of Cassatt

June 3, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Remember our post about data center management software firm Cassatt Corproation being “close to the end” as quoted by the company’s founder and CEO Bill Coleman?

Well Computer Associates just announced the acquisition of certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt, a provider of innovative cloud computing software that makes data centers more efficient. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cassatt’s Rob Gingell, executive vice president of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer, and Steve Oberlin, Chief Scientist and co-founder, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers, and other key employees. In addition, CA has acquired several Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other intellectual property.

CA’s business-driven automation solution helps customers reduce capital and operating costs and improve service quality by enabling dynamic, real-time response to changing business demands. The solution is instrumental in increasing business agility, service quality and control, as well as helping to reduce risk and human error, lower costs, and improve IT efficiency. By this optimization of value, CA automation helps customers achieve Lean IT.

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Featured, People Tagged With: acquisition, bill coleman, CA, cassatt, cassatt corporation, Computer Associates, data center management, data center management software, industry moves, rob gingell, steve oberlin, virtualisation, virtualization

CA Announces Integrated Enterprise IT Management Solutions

November 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CA today announced an integrated suite of Enterprise IT Management (EITM) solutions designed to maximize the business value of virtualization, helping enterprise customers and cloud computing providers improve IT agility and service quality, increase efficiency, and mitigate IT and business risk. The suite leverages one of the industry’s broadest set of IT management, governance and security solutions, spanning virtualized distributed and mainframe computing, storage, network and desktop infrastructures.

CA EITM solutions address this need for virtualization management, and deliver:

Improved Agility

— Provision and monitor resources in the cloud: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps consumers and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale, and manage dynamic computing resources on demand. The solution enables enterprises, Infrastructure Utility providers, business process outsourcers, and cloud computing providers to seamlessly provision and monitor cloud computing resources to allow for overflow capacity during peak demands, rapid policy-based response to business demands, more dynamic failover, and highly efficient infrastructure.
— Accelerate and automate virtualized data center provisioning: CA Data Center Automation Manager empowers IT organizations to integrate and automate virtual and physical server provisioning cycles. By automatically allocating resources in real time based on business policies, customers can accelerate the provisioning of applications into production and rapidly provision additional capacity in response to dynamic business demands.
— Employ change management for dynamic virtualized environments: CA Service Desk Manager’s change management function helps to govern approval of data center automation policies, guided by CA CMDB’s advanced change impact analysis, visibility to complex infrastructure dependencies and record of approved configurations.As automated policies are executed by CA Data Center Automation Manager, CA CMDB and its automated application discovery function can log and track automated changes, allowing change managers to analyze how automated policies are complying with authorized configurations.
— Dynamically extend workload automation to virtualized environments: The integration of CA Workload Automation and CA Data Center Automation Manager provides the unique ability to help to identify and provision computing capacity to accommodate workloads onto virtualized environments. Customers can dynamically implement systems and processes to handle planned and unplanned workload and transaction bursts, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not breached.

Improved Service Quality

— Assure application performance and availability: CA Wily Application Performance Management helps monitor application performance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and when integrated with CA Data Center Automation Manager, can trigger the provisioning of additional virtualized resource pools to avoid or resolve performance problems.
— Discover, track, and monitor the performance of virtual server resources: CA Advanced Systems Management helps IT organizations to discover, track and monitor virtual resources across a breadth of virtual and physical platforms. CA IT Client Manager can perform hardware and software inventory of virtual systems as well as update them with new software and critical security patches.
— Avoid human configuration errors: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps avoid application degradations and outages by maintaining configuration consistency in virtual environments. Using autonomic policies requiring no human intervention, the solution tracks and remediates configuration drift from development through production.
— Improve high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery: CA XOsoft High Availability offers fast and reliable failover and failback capabilities for virtualized servers and applications. CA ARCserve Backup delivers reliable, enterprise-class data protection across multiple hardware and software platforms, including virtual machines. CA can offer replication and high-availability assurance for all resources.
— Assure virtual network availability: CA is architecting its premier network management solutions, CA eHealth Network Performance Manager and CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager, to discover, monitor and deliver fault and performance management for virtualized network resources, leveraging years of customer success with physical network management. This will provide the agility to manage virtual and physical networks from a single pane of glass, help to ensure the quality of network service, help to improve management efficiency, and mitigate the risk of business disruption from network outages.

Increased Efficiency

— Dramatically streamline processes and reduce costs: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to reduce process and organizational complexity and address labor and application costs by implementing automated virtualization-based data center processes. CA is working on integrating CA Data Center Automation Manager with CA Service Catalog. This will help to reduce component complexity through standard service, application and computing resource catalogs and bills of materials. CA IT Asset Manager empowers organizations to streamline the request, approval and assignment of available virtual images.
— Increase server and VM utilization, optimize energy management, and reduce facilities costs: CA NSM identifies and reports on server utilization across the data center, and identifies and prioritizes server candidates for virtualization. CA Advanced Systems Management can dynamically allocate server resources to virtual guests based on their requirements, thereby improving virtual machines to host utilization. CA Data Center Automation Manager can optimize the number of servers required and the energy they consume.
— Optimize asset management, chargeback and virtualization planning: CA IT Asset Manager and CA Service Accounting ease the complex task of tracking cost, licenses and assets across virtualized resources. The solutions also simplify the process of charging lines of business and other stakeholders for their use of shared and dedicated virtualized resources. CA IT Asset Manger, in conjunction with CA Clarity PPM, provides IT leaders with enhanced ability to manage costs, project workflows, and staff for virtualization deployments, aligning the investment to defined and measurable business outcomes. CA Advanced Systems Management assists customers in avoiding VM sprawl and its accompanying cost and complexity while managing demand for additional resources.
— Consolidate the management of security and access policies: CA Access Control’s management console helps an administrator to create, manage and track hundreds of policies across multiple virtual and physical server platforms. This enables a consistent level of protection and reduces the time and resources required to secure these dynamic IT resources.
— Extend mainframe virtualization: CA VM Manager Management Suite for Mainframe Linux helps IT organizations to manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux for System z by managing guest systems and enabling provisioning. This integrated suite of products includes solutions for automated operations, service level management, backup and recovery, storage management and security management. By enabling organizations to maximize machine, personnel, tape and DASD resources, it helps organizations control costs, maintain high service levels and provide efficient system performance. Planned integration with CA Data Center Automation Manager to help customers to gain end-to-end provisioning visibility and management.

Mitigated IT and Business Risks

— Plan data center virtualization efforts: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to discover applications across data centers and enable customers to have critical IT application and infrastructure visibility. Armed with a clear picture of data center configurations between applications, servers, storage and other infrastructure, customers can profile applications based on importance and I/O characteristics. With the addition of CA CMDB’s mapping of applications to business services, they can also focus virtualization efforts on less-critical, lower-risk services and computing resources.
— Secure virtualization environments: CA Access Control manages several of the security risks common to virtualization by protecting critical resources through Separation of Duties (SoD) for privileged or shared accounts. The solution also provides consistent access control policies, resource protection, and entitlement reporting across virtualization hosts and the guest operating systems.
— Maintain compliance: Dynamic virtualization can change computing and information architectures, disrupt tracking and reporting, and also undermine compliance governance based on static, physical environments. CA’s virtualization management offerings, with their ability to track and report on virtualized resources, can help customers monitor their compliance, despite the changes inherent in virtualized environments. CA Access Control and CA Audit provide a comprehensive set of server resource protection reports that can reduce the time, cost and complexity of the compliance process in enterprise environments.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CA, CA EITM, Computer Associates, EITM, Enterprise IT Management, virtualisation, virtualization

CA Wants A Piece Of The Virtualization Pie, Upgrades Data Center Automation Manager

October 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CA today announced a group of products aimed squarely at the new-world data center and its growing ranks of virtual machines. With today’s announcement, CA debuts Data Center Automation Manager 11.2, plus nine tools aimed at infrastructure, application performance and service management, as well as information governance.

CA’s Data Center Automation Manager tool seeks to minimize the amount of time IT spends caring for virtual machines, while improving agility and efficiency. It includes elements such as a rules-based policy engine and the ability to analyze performance measures and configuration details from apps and systems, while integrating with other CA tools including CA AutoSys Workload Automation, CA NSM, CA Service Desk, and CA Wily Introscope. The new products will all be available within a few weeks.

VMware, no stranger to the fact that customers want to use management tools from multiple vendors, introduced its plans for a Data Center OS at VMworld last month. The company envisions this OS as a layer into which other tools vendors can plug, using APIs.

HP takes a similar approach to CA’s, not making hypervisor technology itself like VMware or Microsoft, but offering hardware that makes sense for highly-virtualized data centers, as well as already-known management tools that can pull data from virtualized environments as well as physical ones. HP, with its acquisition of EDS also has a large services organization to help customers with virtualization projects.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: CA, CA AutoSys Workload Automation, CA NSM, CA Service Desk, CA virtualization, CA Wily Introscope, Computer Associates, Data Center Automation Manager, Data Center Automation Manager 11.2, HP, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware

What’s Up At Virtugo Software?

July 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

We got an interesting comment on our report on Qlusters calling it quits, which points us to the fact that the website of Virtugo Software has been down for some time. Commenter Blocka suspects the company has gone belly-up, since the phones have been disconnected and e-mails remain unanswered.

Virtugo Software had a powerful virtual management suite called VirtualSuite, enabling system administrators to monitor host and virtual servers in real-time as well as optimize the performance of applications running on the servers in the virtual environment. In April 2007, Virtugo was acquired by uXcomm, who changed its name in Virtugo Software, and in September 2007 they shipped an upgraded version of VirtualSuite, which got quite some positive reviews. The company also subsequently raised about $2 million in venture capital.

After that, it got a little quiet around Virtugo Software, with the exception of a Network World review of VirtualSuite in February 2008. Then one of the co-founders left the company to become a Vice President at Computer Associates last March. Apparently, Chris Dickson fled a sinking ship.

We have an e-mail in with the company for a response, and well update this post if we get an answer.

If anyone has more information, get in touch.

Filed Under: Featured, Rumors Tagged With: CA, Chris Dickson, Computer Associates, deadpool, uXcomm, uXcomm Virtugo, virtualisation, virtualization, VirtualSuite, Virtugo, Virtugo Software, Virtugo VirtualSuite

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