The new CA Automation Suite features new and enhanced products to automate and standardize virtualization and cloud management tasks.
CA Technologies revamped and relaunched its CA Automation Suite for
virtualized dynamic cloud computing environments, CA said Oct. 18.
The new CA Automation Suite features two new products and enhancements to
four other products, including The CA Server Automation, CA Virtual Automation, CA Client Automation and CA Workload
Automation.
CA
realigned the automation suite with its overall cloud portfolio of products
that automate, integrate and standardize the provisioning and management
of physical, virtual and cloud resources, CA said. The revamp will make the
product line more visible to customers, said Ryan Shopp, senior director of
product marketing of the Virtualization and Automation group at CA
Technologies.
"I was in the industry and I didn't even know CA had an automation
suite," said Shopp, who joined CA earlier this year.
The refreshed automation suite is more business service-centric, so that IT
managers can look at the application and know what it does and who it's for,
according to Shopp. For example, an IT administrator would be able to guess CA
Client Automation's functionality based on the name, as opposed to the previous
generally-named CA IT Client Manager, he said.
The applications can be purchased and implemented as separate modules,
giving customers the flexibility to pick and choose what features they need. When
additional modules are "plugged in" at a later date, the applications
automatically detect and share data, making it very scalable, said Shopp.
CA Process Automation and CA Configuration Automation are new stand-alone
products.
CA Process Automation documents, automates and orchestrates a range of
processes across platforms, applications and IT groups, CA said. IT managers
can use the tool to reduce operational expenses, increase staff productivity
and increase speed in delivering IT services, according to Shopp.
CA Configuration Automation identifies and standardizes device
configurations and tracks cross-device dependencies, CA said. IT managers can
perform application and system discovery and create dependency maps across a
range of applications and distributed physical and virtual servers, said Shopp.
The enhancements to existing products include new hypervisor support and
management tools for public, private and hybrid clouds.
CA Client Automation integrates and automates a wide range of client device
management tasks such as bare metal buildups and rebuilds, patch management,
Windows 7 migration, and remote desktop support, CA said. The enhancements
include application virtualization management and VMware VDI linked clone
management.
CA Server Automation dynamically provisions, patches and deploys
applications and services across physical and virtual systems based on standard
templates and performance metrics. Enhancements include support for new
hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon VPC.
CA Virtual Automation provides self-service and automated virtual server
provisioning for public, private and hybrid clouds. It can directly provision
applications on Amazon EC2. Enhancements include support for new hypervisors
including Microsoft Hyper-V and for Cisco
Unified Computing System.
CA Workload Automation automates and optimizes the scheduling, monitoring
and dynamic balancing of enterprise workloads. The enhancements include dynamic
management of mixed workloads for virtualized resources, the ability to
schedule workloads in public clouds such as Amazon EC2, and the ability to
manage, monitor and troubleshoot business workloads.
These stand-alone modules are also available in three preintegrated packages
aligned with specific business services: hybrid clouds, Cisco UCS and data
centers.
The CA Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds, for building private
clouds that leverage the public cloud for storage, consists of CA Process
Automation, CA Server Automation, CA Virtual Automation, and CA Service Catalog
and Accounting.
CA Automation Suite for Cisco UCS, for deploying and managing Cisco UCS
environments, consists of CA Configuration Automation, CA Process Automation,
CA Server Automation and CA Virtual Automation.
CA Automation Suite for Data Centers consists of CA Configuration
Automation, CA Process Automation, CA Server Automation and CA Virtual
Automation. Previously available as CA
Spectrum Automation Manager, this package manages integrated physical and
virtual infrastructure.
"The CA Automation Suite is designed to absorb this complexity, helping
IT to increase agility, reduce risk and cost, and improve service delivery
while aligning with the business in unprecedented, transformational ways,"
said Roger Pilc, general manager of the Virtualization and Automation group.
Email
Print
