CA Introduces New and Enhanced Solutions to Help Customers Gain Greater Return from Virtualised Environments
Announcement posted by CA Technologies 27 Oct 2009
Sydney 27 October 2009 – CA, Inc. (Nasdaq: CA) today announced 12 new and updated Enterprise IT Management products that will help enterprises and service providers gain increased business value from virtualised environments. CA's solutions allow organisations to realise greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from virtualised computing environments through comprehensive capabilities for IT management, governance, automation and security.
"CA Enterprise IT Management customers can achieve a balance between control and business agility when managing virtualised resources and systems," said Brenton Smith, VP and Area Manager, CA Australia and New Zealand. "CA solutions build on the management capabilities within popular virtualisation platforms, but then extend those with enterprise-class, heterogeneous management for improved overall business results."
Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualisation, with 31 percent of operating system instances virtualised in 2008 and growing to 54 percent in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision makers in North America and Europe, conducted Forrester Research, Inc.* By simplifying and automating the management of virtualised and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualisation more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology for virtualisation, including solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.
"Enterprise customers building VMware-based virtualised infrastructures can achieve higher levels of cross-infrastructure visibility and automation with CA's complementary management solutions," said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. "CA and VMware's management solutions present a compelling combination for joint customers to maximise the return on their virtualisation investments and enable further expansion of their virtual infrastructure."
New and Enhanced Products from CA Help Reduce the Business Risks and Increase the Benefits of Virtualisation
New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:
- NEW: CA Spectrum(R) Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualisation of infrastructure in the context of IT services; a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.- CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralised application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualisation deployments and enable quicker server recovery. It will also features extended support across VMware vSphere(TM), Citrix Xen(TM), IBM LPAR, Sun Solaris(TM) and other platforms for centralised management of eterogeneous environments -- helping to improve cost efficiency, agility, service quality, and mitigating IT and business risk. - CA eHealth(R) Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA's virtualisation management capabilities - CA Insight(TM) Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2(R) for Linux(R), UNIX(R) and Windows(R); Oracle; SQL Server(R) and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments -- even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion(TM) -- without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter(TM) Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for "at-a-glance" problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.
"Acxiom(R) is planning to use CA Spectrum Automation Manager in combination with other Acxiom technology assets to manage an internal cloud that increases IT efficiency and drives down cost," said David Guzman, vice president and chief information officer of Acxiom. "CA Spectrum Automation Manager will help Acxiom continue to deliver quality services while optimising existing resources across our pool of servers by automatically provisioning/de-provisioning physical and virtual servers within our internal grid."
In additional announcements last week and today, CA announced other new and updated products that help improve the management of virtualised environments, including:
- CA Access Control 12.5 with new features to deliver comprehensive privileged user management and enhanced host access control; - Improved integration of CA Identity Manager 12.5 and CA Role & Compliance Manager 12.5 for more streamlined identity lifecycle management, including innovative Smart Provisioning capabilities;- CA DLP 12.0 with extended discovery, protection, and control of sensitive data, and new integrations to complementary solutions;- CA Records Manager 12.6 with additional features for information governance and content protection, as well as addressing compliance demands; and- CA Governance, Risk & Compliance Manager 2.5 (CA GRC Manager) with new features to further strengthen its role as the primary platform for management of IT risk and compliance information and initiatives.
Governance