CA, Inc. announced that it is bringing enhanced automation and management of existing internal IT infrastructures and external cloud services to the enterprise. CA's Business-Driven Automation, Service Management, Application Performance Management, and Database Management solutions now support the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). CA also plans to extend the capabilities of several Systems Management solutions to support Amazon EC2. The power and flexibility to manage applications in the Amazon EC2 environment as an extension of their enterprise helps customers achieve Lean IT.
The support of CA Spectrum Automation Manager, CA CMDB, CA Service Desk Manager, CA Wily Introscope, and CA Insight Database Performance Manager (DPM) for Amazon EC2 can enable customers to achieve Lean IT by provisioning capacity to Amazon EC2, the vendor says. The solution set also helps automate rapid, policy-based responses to changing business demands, facilitating improved security and compliance. The vendor says support for EC2 will also improve end-user response times and service performance across existing infrastructure and Amazon EC2 while triaging bottlenecks by monitoring transactions across these infrastructure components.
"We see the Amazon relationship as a way to assist customers in their decision to adopt cloud services, in this case from Amazon," Stephen Elliot, vice president of Strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "CA wants to remove the risks of cloud service adoption for customers, notably in areas such as performance visibility, security, self service provisioning, and VM migrations from the internal to external cloud."
CA's Business-Driven Automation strategy is designed to provide IT organizations the flexibility to respond to changing business demands as they occur. CA Spectrum Automation Manager provides full support of Amazon EC2 resources. The integration of the two solutions can help organizations realize the cost savings, scalability and improved service quality that cloud computing offers. By using informed automation and process automation, CA Spectrum Automation Manager enables customers to dynamically and rapidly respond to fluctuations in resource demand through automatic provisioning and configuration of Amazon EC2 resources.
Further integration with CA Service Desk Manager (that includes CA CMDB) governs the change and configuration management process for provisioned Amazon EC2 resources. CA Service Desk Manager allows IT organizations to track change requests to help facilitate compliance with business best practices, ITIL process models, and regulatory rules and procedures. Adding Amazon EC2 infrastructure to the 360-degree view of individual infrastructure components lets CA Service Desk Manager perform impact analysis on planned changes to help avoid business disruptions.
"CA is working with many public cloud providers today," Elliot says. "In fact, many of our enterprise customers, while they might not say they have a cloud strategy, are deploying CA solutions to enable cloud like capabilities such as automation, models based management, end to end root cause analytics, integrated fault and performance management, integrated virtual and physical management, and service impact analysis. For many customers, these technologies enable scalability for virtualized clouds."
The support of CA Wily Introscope, a key component of the CA Wily Application Performance Management solution, for Amazon EC2 allows enterprises to maintain the visibility of transactions and business processes through internal physical or virtual systems and their external cloud resources hosted on Amazon EC2. CA Wily Introscope helps customers ensure that applications address business and service level goals by helping them to proactively identify, triage and resolve performance problems before end users are impacted.
Customers can gain even more benefits by using CA Spectrum Automation Manager and CA Insight DPM in conjunction with CA Wily Introscope. Using real-time application and database performance metrics enables enterprises to make infrastructure-provisioning decisions with the end user in mind. The integration of these solutions can help customers achieve Lean IT by eliminating waste and increasing efficiency.
CA Insight DPM helps customers improve availability and performance of databases running in physical, virtual and/or Amazon EC2 environments. Customers can now place their databases in the cloud and continue to proactively manage their performance.
To provide additional business value, CA also plans to architect several of its Systems Management solutions to support the Amazon EC2. For example, updates to CA eHealth Performance Manager, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, and CA NSM currently planned will provide customers the ability to remotely monitor the health and performance of Amazon Web Services-based resources as an integrated and natural extension of existing in-house IT infrastructure.
"We expect over time that customers will accelerate their use of cloud services, from Amazon and others," Elliot says. "Many are tire kicking today and exploring price points. We expect both existing and new customers to reap the business benefits that CA and its partners work hard to deliver."
For more information about CA's solutions for managing cloud computing environments, go here.