CA Technologies has expanded its support for Amazon Web services (AWS), bundling a number of key products into a service offering to help manage and monitor cloud implementations through Amazon. The CA products now supporting Amazon include CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and Nimsoft Monitoring Solution, which can now be plugged into the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
The new offerings are intended to help enterprises automate the deployment of applications and resources within the AWS cloud infrastructure, monitor the technical performance of the services and help ensure that the use of the resources at any given time is optimally aligned with business requirements, Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA's infrastructure management and data center automation business unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We get a lot of questions from customers about not only the service offerings from public providers, but how they can look at the performance, and manage a bunch virtual machines out in the public cloud?," he says. "We hear questions such as, ‘What are the services that I'm going to get?' ‘How will I know if they're going to be performing?' ‘How will I manage a virtual machine that I might be testing internally?' "
CA Technologies' support offerings are designed to help companies extend their data center into the cloud using a secure industry-standard encrypted IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, create an isolated network, specify the IP address range of their own choosing, and then launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances into that network.
"We've seen a tremendous surge in tire-kicking going on with Amazon and others," Elliot says. "That begs the question of how does a customer assure that the performance of the service, the security of the service, and manage the resources that they put out on that third-party cloud? How can they get the same level of capability that they have internally? The numbers might look good, but the risk is huge."
CA Technologies supports both Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC, enabling customers to use one set of tools to successfully manage their IT resources across on premise resources and AWS. For example, customers can use CA Virtual Automation to rapidly deploy, expand, and control resources into Amazon Web Services; and CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers to proactively monitor and manage combined on-premise, and Amazon Web Services resources.
In addition, CA Spectrum Automation Manager provides a self-service interface and administrator control for provisioning of compute resources and applications into both on-premise data centers and into Amazon Web services. CA AutoSys Workload Automation provisions Amazon Web Services cloud resources dynamically to address the requirements of enterprise workloads.
CA Insight Database Performance Manager is intended to improve availability of databases running within physical, virtual and/or Amazon Web Services environments through proactive performance management and informed automation. CA's Nimsoft Monitoring Solution monitors, manages, and optimizes the performance of applications, from the data center to the Amazon Web Services environment, including SaaS, hosted, and virtualized environments.
"This is a tremendous opportunity for IT organizations to think what are the IT capabilities that they might want to get from a third-party provider such as Amazon," Elliot says.
For additional information, visit the CA Technologies website.