The three new products are CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, and Virtual Configuration, and new capabilities have been added to CA Spectrum Automation Manager and CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers (formerly CA Virtual Performance Management).
Over the past year, CA has made a strategic investments in virtualization management, integrated with an overarching view of how it sees the market growing from virtualization management toward cloud computing, Subo Guha, vice president of product management for the CA Virtualization and Service Automation business unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "2010 heralds a new wave for CA's push in virtual management."
The focus of CA's virtualization portfolio is on solving a customer's lifecycle problems. Customers have pain points along a lifecycle of needs in virtualization," emphasizes Guha. "Virtualization is a very dynamic environment. It is a fundamental shift that is happening in the industry and what customers need is a full spectrum of management that they will see as being able to alleviate their problems so that they can adopt more and more virtual systems."
Although virtualization has allowed organizations to reduce capital expenditure and provide basic resource efficiencies, most virtualization has occurred across low-risk servers, which represent only 15%-30% of workloads. IT leaders have been reluctant to extend virtualization to core functions, because of concerns about lack of control, visibility, and scalability, resource availability and effective allocation and use of skills. The CA virtualization management portfolio is intended to help customers overcome these hurdles by providing advanced lifecycle and automation capabilities. These products are aimed at enabling better management of complex, heterogeneous physical and virtual environments - across multiple vendors, platforms, and technologies, both on and off-premise.
New products for assurance, automation and configuration of heterogeneous virtualization environments include CA Virtual Assurance, which is intended to help customers improve uptime and performance of virtual and private cloud environments by providing monitoring, event correlation, and fault and performance management. CA Virtual Automation is designed to help customers rapidly deploy, expand, and control virtual and private cloud environments through automated self-service virtualization machine lifecycle management. CA Virtual Configuration enables customers to maintain operational consistency and compliance in dynamic virtual and private cloud environments, providing discovery of virtual environments, including application dependencies, configuration change tracking and thousands of compliance security and best practice pre-defined rules to help track and encourage the path towards greater standardization.
CA Technologies also enhanced two of its enterprise-class virtualization management products, which are already available in several existing CA Technology product portfolios, the vendor says. CA Spectrum Automation Manager helps customers deploy, expand, and control hybrid heterogeneous physical, virtual, and cloud environments by providing comprehensive provisioning, configuration, workflow, orchestration, and self-service functionality. New capabilities include Cisco UCS platform support, integration with CA Access Control for host access control and privileged user management, self-service resource reservation chargeback, advanced resource pool management, provisioning support for Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC, and further extension of CA Technologies' heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud support.
Additionally, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers (formerly CA Virtual Performance Management) is an add-on product to CA Technologies' enterprise managers that provides operational visibility and control for hybrid heterogeneous physical, virtual, and private cloud environments. New features include support for very large scale virtual and physical performance management, with centralized deployment and configuration, and integration into end-to-end monitoring of IT infrastructure, including virtual and physical systems, networks, databases and applications.
"We are taking an integrated and holistic approach compared to other vendors," says Guha. While the focus on virtualization started initially as part of a consolidation effort to reduce costs, at the end of the day, people are really looking to take the next step to optimize their business value virtualization which is to provide that rapid, dynamic infrastructure for optimized operational cost as well as competitive differentiation. CA is uniquely able, states Guha, to "provide virtualization management tied with service automation and service management across the lifecycle of customer needs as they continue their journey of virtualization."
For more information about CA Technologies' virtualization management portfolio, go here. http://www.ca.com/virtualization