CA Debuts Cloud Management Software Suite

As most companies do at their user conferences, CA has been busy making news this week at CA World in Las Vegas.
CA on Nov. 19 introduced its first integrated suite of enterprise IT management software products designed to manage cloud computing and all the vagaries of virtualization efficiently and cost-effectively.

But CA didn't give the suite a specific name, instead referring to the new cloud-management bundle as simply its "CA EITM solutions." EITM is an acronym for "enterprise IT management."

The data center management software suite utilizes CA's standard set of IT management, governance and security products, which cover virtualized and distributed computing, mainframes, storage, networking, and desktops.

Resource Library:

Basically, the software bundle keeps tabs on data center resources so as to allow administrators to thin-provision storage needs, provision and monitor computing resources in the cloud, and employ more effective change management for virtualized environments.

Ultimately, all of this automation saves both staff time and power draw, and cuts way back on data center carbon footprints.

"The over-provisioning model used by data centers for years is rapidly becoming unsustainable—especially in this economic environment," said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner. "As a consequence, a new, dynamic data center model is emerging, driven by new management strategies and supported by virtualization and automation technologies."

Here are details about a few of the products made available for the suite:

CA Data Center Automation Manager helps both users and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale and manage cloud computing resources. CA said it enables enterprises, IT utility providers, business process outsourcers and cloud computing 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.

CA Service Desk Manager's change management function helps to govern approval of data center automation policies, guided by CA CMDB's (Configuration Management Database's) advanced change impact analysis, visibility to complex infrastructure dependencies and record of approved configurations.

When used in tandem, CA Workload Automation and CA Data Center Automation Manager provide the ability to identify and provision computing capacity to accommodate workloads in virtualized environments.

CA Wily Application Performance Management helps monitor application performance across both physical and virtual infrastructures. When integrated with CA Data Center Automation Manager, it can trigger the provisioning of additional virtualized resource pools to avoid or resolve performance problems.

CA Advanced Systems Management helps IT organizations discover, track and monitor virtual resources across a breadth of virtual and physical platforms.

CA IT Client Manager performs hardware and software inventory of virtual systems and updates them with new software and critical security patches.

There are a number of other pieces that can be included in the suite. For more information, go here.