CA Bulks Up Virtualization Offerings

CA is ramping up its virtualization management offerings with new and enhanced products aimed at easing the tasks of implementing and securing virtualized environments.

The new offerings, announced Oct. 26, touch on everything from management and compliance to automation and energy efficiency.

“There’s a tremendous amount of focus around how do you manage a virtualized architecture and how do you take along the physical [systems],” Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit.

Adding to the discussion is the growing interest in the cloud computing model, of which virtualization is a foundation technology, Elliot said. For many enterprises, that means private clouds that can be deployed within their own environments.

“Virtualization will grow, but you won’t virtualize everything,” he said. “A lot of people are asking, ‘How do I deploy a private cloud?’”

Analysts are continuing to predict a healthy future for virtualization in the data center. Forrester Research said in a reporter in February that 31 percent of operating systems currently are virtualized, and that number will jump to 59 percent in 2011. In addition, Gartner analysts at their Symposium/ITxpo event Oct. 21 that while currently, only 16 percent of IT workloads currently are running on virtual machines, that will grow to 50 percent by the end of 2012.

All that’s being drive by the need for greater energy efficiency and flexibility, and the desire to drive down capital and operating expenses. It also is increasing the management headaches as virtualized environments grow in size and complexity.

CA’s management software is designed to ease those headaches, Elliot said.

Among CA’s new offerings is Spectrum Service Assurance, which is designed to give IT administrators greater visibility into their virtualized environments, and how their virtualized and physical environments impact the services those systems support.

In addition, CA is expanding the capabilities of its eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 to cover virtualized environments from VMware and other vendors, Elliot said. It also includes enhanced environmental and energy monitoring.

In that same vein, CA’s new ecoMeter and ecoGovernance tools gives IT administrators the ability to track the energy savings derived from server virtualization.

Enhancements to Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 includes faster physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual provisioning, expanded support for such virtualization platforms as VMware’s vSphere 4, Citrix Systems’ Xen, IBM’s LPAR and the virtualization technology in Sun Microsystems’ Solaris OS.

Insight Database Performance Manager r11.3 lets administrators monitor the performance of their databases—including IBM’s DB2, Oracle, Microsoft’s SQL Server and Sybase—in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Administrators get automated views of these databases in VMware environments.

On the security side, CA is offering upgraded capabilities in its Access Control 12.5, Identity Manager 12.5, Role and Compliance Manager 12.5, Records Manager 12.6, and Governance, Risk and Compliance manager 2.5.