Breaking News—CA Announces Enterprise Virtualization and Cloud Computing Suite
Today at CA World, CA announced an integrated suite of Enterprise IT Management (EITM) solutions designed to maximize the business value of virtualization and cloud computing. The suite leverages IT management, governance and security solutions, spanning virtualized distributed and mainframe computing, storage, network and desktop infrastructures.
EITM solutions that support virtualization include Application Performance Management; Dynamic & Virtual Systems Management; Identity & Access Management; IT Asset Management; IT Client Management; Recovery Management; Service Desk Management; Service Level & Catalog Management; and Workload Automation.
"One of the things that we have recognized with the customers is the need to make sure that there is an awareness about all the key solutions that we have that virtualization is impacting—whether it is the application, or the desktop, the storage infrastructure—even the server infrastructures," Stephen Elliot, vice president of business unit strategy for CA, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Many of CA's customers, said Elliot, "have our solutions to help them manage these pieces of the infrastructure and as they get more and more virtualized, CA's solutions are able to manage them, irrespective of whether they are physical or virtual." Often, CA can integrate the physical management and virtual management within its consoles themselves, he added.
CA also said that CA Data Center Automation Manager has been upgraded to help consumers and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale, and manage dynamic compute resources on demand. "We have been able to extend the provisioning, performance and the change configuration capabilities of this product to assist in managing the cloud," said Elliot.
The solution now enables enterprises, infrastructure utility providers, business process outsourcers, and cloud computer providers to provision and monitor cloud computing resources to allow for overflow capacity during peak demands, rapid policy-based response to business demands, more dynamic failover, and highly efficient infrastructure. "We are in the game in earnest with CA Data Center Automation Manager, and really helping organizations manage the cloud-whether it is an internal cloud or these really exploding external clouds in terms of the service offerings."
Visit CA's website to learn more about CA's EITM solutions.
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Breaking News—Symantec Offers Cloud-Based Management Suite
Symantec Corp. said it plans to launch a suite of management services that will be delivered via a cloud-computing model. Veritas Operations Services, to be announced Wednesday, tracks best practices, optimal configurations, hardware compatibility lists and software compatibility lists for Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, leading operating systems and storage area network software and firmware. A collection of Web-based services use this information to identify data center risks and improve the productivity of operations teams as they try to deal with the new data center architectures and scale. Alerts include steps for guided remediation to speed and simplify resolution.
The first two services to be made available include Veritas Installation Assessment and Veritas Storage Foundation Health Check, which provide what the company describes as an alternative to traditional reactive operations models.
Key Veritas Installation Assessment Service features include automated, agentless, data collection by the Installation Assessment Service to validate server and storage configurations prior to product installation or upgrade to determine the readiness of infrastructure; detailed reporting indicating pass, fail, or warning of critical configuration variables with web-based hyperlinks directly to required patches and relevant documentation; proactive patch notification service for available patches related to the unique server and storage configuration in the environment; agentless assessment that can run on a single server or across multiple servers and multiple OSes without requiring the installation of Veritas Storage Foundation or Veritas Cluster Server.
"Customers are looking for ways to more easily manage their environment and mitigate risk in their environment," Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability for Symantec, told 5 Minute Briefing. Leveraging the cloud computing model, Symantec can "more readily and easily give customers real-time information based upon their environment, but compare that against all the other customers that are using the offering and our extensive testing and qualification to ensure that the applications and databases, servers and storage all work together," he said.
There is a performance dimension to this as well, observed Josh Kahn, senior director for Veritas Storage Foundation. "We have seen a number of customers that call in with performance problems in their stack and we realized that there are configuration settings that they either have not turned on or have set inappropriately that can have an impact. As we see those cases become common, we can build them into this framework and push them out to customers." This will give customers assurance that they are getting "the highest performance, the best availability and the best utilization" they can for their infrastructure spending, Kahn said.
Other services available include a Storage Foundation Health Check, which identifies configuration errors that can result in downtime, performance issues and poor resource utilization. More information on Veritas Operations Services is available here.
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CA Acquires Eurekify to Expand Identity and Access Management Portfolio
CA announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Eurekify, a pioneer in identity and role management. The deal is expected to close by the end of the month. Eurekify's operations will be integrated into CA's business.
CA has collaborated with Eurekify for the past several months on the integration and sale of Eurekify technology as part of the larger CA Security Management Business Unit solution. The CA-Eurekify solution addresses the demand for a new generation of identity and access management solutions that are business-centric, said CA. With this acquisition, CA intends to deliver deeper product integration, and continued development and extension of products, particularly those that facilitate role-based, business-driven identity management and access control.
The combination of CA Identity Manager with Eurekify Enterprise Role Manager provides a system that helps customers clean up existing identity data and build a role model with the best available information, serving as the foundation to automate the user provisioning process and enhancing identity lifecycle management.
"Eurekify is CA's second acquisition in the security space in two months, coming on the heels of our purchase of IDFocus in October. These acquisitions, along with our organically developed products, ensure CA's continued strength in the growing security market," said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager, CA Security Management.
A key to the success of Eurekify's role modeling capabilities is an analytics engine, which uses advanced, pattern-based analytics to reduce the time and effort involved in traditionally labor-intensive duties within role management that often derailed identity management projects, said CA. It also helps deliver business-driven "smart provisioning" for real-time enhancements of identity and non-identity business processes. For more information, go here.
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HP Announces Storage Area Networking Platform
HP announced a software and hardware storage virtualization solution intended to enable enterprises to improve productivity, simplify operations and lower total cost of ownership for their storage-area network (SAN) environments. Part of its portfolio of storage virtualization solutions, the new HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) improves the efficiency and simplifies the management of heterogeneous midrange storage arrays, said HP.
HP SVSP is a network-based storage platform that pools capacity across HP and non-HP storage hardware. It works together with the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) as well as a number of third-party arrays to centralize the management of a virtualized SAN environment.
HP SVSP features data services enable customers to adapt to changing business needs while reducing total cost of ownership and enhancing disaster recovery capabilities. Online data migration allows storage administrators to easily redistribute application data to improve performance and move data to lower-cost storage without disrupting business operations. Thin provisioning allows customers to purchase less storage hardware up front and easily add capacity as their businesses grow. Data replication – including clones, snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous local mirroring – improves disaster recovery and facilitates data backup capabilities.
The data services "will enable people to take advantage of virtualization to really impact their environments and improve the total cost of ownership," Edgardo Lopez, product marketing manager in the Storage Networking Group, focusing on virtualization products at HP, told 5 Minute Briefing. "People are looking at ways in which they can do more with less so they can be more efficient, and ways in which they can save costs and delay capital acquisitions," he said.
The HP SVSP separates data flow from management processes so the processing power needed to handle the data path workloads can scale independently from the resources used for management. This results in performance and scalability than traditional architectures, said HP.
The HP StorageWorks SVSP is expected to be available in December. More information about HP StorageWorks is available here.
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Replicate Technologies Announces Data Center Fault-Detection Solution
Replicate Technologies has announced the general availability of its first product, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA), which features discovery, analysis, and remediation tools for diagnosing data center issues in an era of increasing virtualization.
"The company was founded with the belief that virtualization enables a whole new mechanism of managing the data center," Oren Teich, vice president of products, Replicate, told 5 Minute Briefing. However, the "traditional break-fix cycle" in the data center in which everything is monitored "and then you respond to problems in a fire drill manner is fundamentally broken," he said. "It is very expensive and we realized that with virtualization we have a way to bypass that-so we are taking advantage of virtualization to introduce a new method of managing the data center and we are calling that predictive fault management. RDA is the first product that delivers on this."
A key capability of RDA 1.0 includes Active Discovery, which deploys virtual appliances to discover and model the combined virtual and physical data center systems, assessing the unified infrastructure for configuration fault issues. In addition, Predictive Analysis discovers and diagnoses latent issues in the unified data center using a catalog of Knowledge Modules that encode best practice and expert guidance for the resolution of identified faults. Another feature in RDA is Resolution Guidance, which delivers expert guidance in order to quickly identify and prioritize important issues and expedite repair.
"We are able to analyze the entire data center, inspect what is going on, discover how things are set up and then proactively and predictively identify where faults may occur and give you advanced warning and notice, and then allow you to fix those problems with some specific guidance," said Teich.
RDA 1.0 is a virtual appliance that works in VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, offers a web-based user interface and integrates with VMware VirtualCenter. According to Teich, support is planned for Hyper-V and then further on for XenSource. A trial version of RDA is available for evaluation here.
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