CA Technologies today announced CA Automation Suite, a package of new and enhanced products and solutions that offers dynamic deployment and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure and services by automating, orchestrating, integrating and standardizing the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources.
"The bottom line is that you can't have cloud without automation," Ryan Shopp, senior director for product marketing for CA's service automation portfolio, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In a sense, "virtualization plus automation equals cloud," Shopp notes, "because automation is that promise of dynamic and self-healing and all those things that cloud computing evolves to be. Of course, you couldn't have it without virtualization because you need the abstraction capabilities of control up into a software layer."
The CA Automation Suite features two new products and enhancements to four other products. With all the components, Shopp says, an effort has been made "to make it a little more prescriptive in what the name actually represents to the product" - so users can easily understand what each accomplishes functionally. The CA Automation Suite products may be purchased and implemented separately, or in three new pre-integrated solutions designed for critical use-case requirements: CA Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds, CA Automation Suite for Cisco UCS, and CA Automation Suite for Data Centers.
CA Process Automation, a new part of CA's business service automation line-up, is designed to help reduce operational expenses, increase staff productivity and increase speed in delivering IT services by documenting, automating, and orchestrating processes across platforms, applications, and IT groups. Key features include a graphical designer interface, more than 50 CA Technologies tools and third-party pre-built data connectors, and visual exception handling to provide context to the architects of the tasks being automated and enable quicker results.
CA Configuration Automation, also being announced today, is intended to enable greater standardization of IT services, reduce downtime, and increase compliance with regulatory and IT security policies by providing application and system discovery and dependency mapping across a range of applications and distributed physical and virtual servers. Key features include granular configuration tracking and auditing; more than 1,000 out-of-the-box application, service and system templates and policies; and the option to use either agent or agent-less approaches.
A third product supporting business service automation, CA Workload Automation automates and optimizes the scheduling of enterprise workloads, helping IT meet service level objectives of mission critical workloads.
Under the banner of infrastructure automation, CA Virtual Automation is intended to provide self-service and automated virtual server provisioning. A second product that is also part of the infrastructure automation line-up, CA Server Automation, dynamically provisions, patches, and deploys applications and services across physical and virtual systems. It also offers support for new hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V and support for Cisco UCS. Additionally, CA Client Automation (formerly CA IT Client Manager), integrates and automates a wide range of client device management tasks.
For details about the CA Automation Suite and the three new pre-integrated solutions, go here.