CA Technologies Acquires Hyperformix

CA Technologies has acquired Hyperformix, a company that sells capacity management software for virtual environments. The move strengthens CA's ability to build and manage internal cloud environments.

CA Technologies officials announced the agreement on Sept. 28 but did not disclose any financial details. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2010.

Capacity management enables customers to discover how physical, virtual, hardware, software, storage and network resources are being used, and to determine what resources will be needed in the future. It is difficult to do properly in virtualized environments because the physical hardware is pooled and subdivided into logical or virtual entities. The application, network and disk resources being used on a virtual machine are tricky to monitor alongside the physical server's hardware utilization.

"Virtualization capacity management is among customers' most critical IT management needs," said Roger Pilc, general manager of CA Technologies' virtualization and automation customer solutions business.

VM "sprawl" often occurs as virtual machines proliferate and become lost from view, leading to needless consumption of resources.

VM "stall" is another challenge, the company said, in which customers are unable to move beyond the initial virtualization of 20 to 30 percent of servers.

"Hyperformix will give our customers sophisticated, real-time and predictive capacity management capabilities," Andi Mann, CA's vice president of virtualization product marketing, wrote in his blog. The idea is that customers will have the necessary information to know how much more of the data center can be virtualized.

Acknowledging that CA's existing capacity management capabilities tend to be limited to "deployments we can control," Mann said, Hyperformix will let customers see what VMs are in use, what they can shut down and what capacity they need in order to overcome VM sprawl.

Customers can ensure high performance and SLA (service-level agreement) achievement within existing capacity limitations "without poring for hours over performance trending reports," Mann said.

With the acquisition of Hyperformix, CA Technologies expands its slate of virtualization, automation and assurance offerings.

"As a virtualization rollout progresses through the enterprise, insight and comprehensive planning are needed," Hyperformix CEO Peter Klante said in a statement.

CA Technologies and Hyperformix share many customers and partners, and this acquisition would directly support those organizations that need "sophisticated capacity management to support their virtualization strategy ... beyond what [CA does] already with performance and reporting," Mann wrote.

Hyperformix sells capacity management software including Hyperformix Capacity Manager, Data Manager and Performance Optimizer. The applications put a "modern" user interface on top of systems management information collected from other sources and apply that information to virtual machine management.

Hyperformix's operations and its employees will become part of the CA Technologies' Virtualization and Automation business. Hyperformix products will be integrated into CA Technologies' offerings, which include the CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and CA Cloud portfolios.