LAS VEGAS—Computer Associates International Inc. Monday opened the kimono a little wider on its new On Demand Computing technology, code-named Sonar, that will significantly advance the scope and scale of CAs initiative.
Sonar, which can automatically discover IT resources and map those resources to business processes to link monitoring and change management with mission-critical processes, will be added across the Islandia, N.Y., companys primary product brands in stages over time.
The patented and patent-pending technology can discover and map IT assets, define the relationship between assets and business processes and automate reprovisioning of IT resources when critical business process applications requirements threaten to exceed existing limits.
Four new offerings introduced Monday implement some components of Sonar. Those include the new Unicenter NSM Option for VMware Software, Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option 3.0, eTrust Vulnerability Manager and BrightStor Process Automation Manager.
Unicenter NSM Option for VMware Software can monitor virtual machines created using the third-party virtualization software for Intel-based Linux and Windows, and it determines when more resources are required to meet contracted service levels.
Unicenter NSM Dynamic Option 3.0 can now dynamically reprovision VMware virtual machines. CA and VMware intend to perform additional integration of their products to automatically reallocate resources according to business demands.
The eTrust Vulnerability Manager, intended to address the time-consuming process of determining which patches are required and where, can identify security exposures and take immediate action to eliminate those vulnerabilities.
BrightStor Process Automation Manager automates storage management and provisioning across multiple platforms.
The underlying Sonar technology, parts of which were acquired from the Silent Runner subsidiary of Raytheon, can monitor network traffic across all seven layers of the protocol stack, including databases, applications, middleware and messaging systems. “It determines whats going on in the network and then applies analytics to map traffic to business processes,” said CA Chief Technology Officer Yogesh Gupta in his keynote address Monday.
Sonar understands up to 1,700 different protocols and builds a knowledge base from data gathered in its auto-discovery function. It can also apply analytics for root cause determination of performance problems or outages.
Key to its ability to scale is the fact that it gathers intelligence without requiring an agent be installed on managed systems.
The technology also promises to build business process views based on its relationship mapping capability, which one large Unicenter user found promising.
“With Sonar we envision being able to develop business process views in a more efficient manner,” said George Fiedorowicz, vice president of technology operations at Concord EFS Concord Corporate Services Inc. services arm in Wilmington, Del.
Fiedorowicz estimated that it took his staff as many as 45 days to manually build business process views in existing Unicenter management tools.