CA has announced the acquisition of certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt Corporation, a provider of cloud computing software that helps makes data centers more efficient. 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.
As data center environments become more complex with composite applications and cloud computing, CA infrastructure management solutions help customers to better understand the economic impact of their IT systems and how to optimize them to support business goals. "CA probably has the best monitoring and analysis technology in the world," both in terms of the breadth of what is monitored and in terms of the depth of ability to process and analyze what is monitored," Donald Ferguson, CA's chief architect, tells 5 Minute Briefing. And, he notes, "We have got extraordinarily good technology for effect-causing action."
Cassatt has some innovative architecture implementation ideas and algorithms for doing policy- and model-based optimization of data center workloads, according to Ferguson. Incorporating Cassatt's analysis and optimization capabilities into CA's business-driven automation solution will enable cloud-style computing to drive efficiencies in both on-premises, private data centers and off-premises, utility data centers and result in a comprehensive infrastructure management approach, spanning monitoring, analysis, planning, optimization and execution.
It is the "model-driven control and policy logic that is the key insight that they had," notes Ferguson, explaining that to do this type of intelligent optimization "you need to have a lot of monitoring capability and you need to have a lot of agents and effectors." Ferguson adds, "Their key value however was the intelligent, informed optimization so any work that they did on monitoring and effecting was just a means to enabling their value and it distracted from their ability to focus on the real innovation that they had. Since we have such good technology for monitoring and effecting, the team doesn't need to worry about that anymore. They can integrate with our product."
The acquisition fits well with CA's Lean IT approach, adds Ferguson. At CA, "We talk about Lean IT and you have to do an optimization to make yourself more lean. This gives us the ability, the intelligence, to actually make the inline, continuous improvement recommendations." For more information, go here.