CA is upgrading its data center management software to address the growing trend toward integrated infrastructures.
CA announced April 27 that it is enhancing its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and eHealth Performance Manager software to give IT administrators a single point from which to manage their physical and virtualized data center environments.
The new releases of the software, which will be available later this year, will touch upon everything from virtualized environments to networked application flows, IT telephony applications, MPLS (multiprotocol switching labels) network services, and carrier-class service delivery platforms, according to CA officials.
The enhancements come as vendors-trying to meet the customer demands for higher data center performance and reduced costs-roll out integrated infrastructure offerings. Those vendors with the most recent announcements include Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.
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CA officials say the ability for IT administrators to manage both their physical and virtual environments from a single place will save money-IT staffs will no longer have to buy, learn and maintain disparate management tools. It also will help businesses better use existing tools and to ramp up their virtualization initiatives more quickly.
The new features in Spectrum Infrastructure Manager r9.1 and eHealth Performance Manager r6.1.1 will enable data center managers to keep tabs on almost every aspect of their VMware environments, from discovering, visualizing and performance monitoring to isolating faults, conducting root cause and impact analyses, and tracking virtual machine movement and utilization.
Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit, said businesses are having a difficult time monitoring their increasingly complex virtualization deployments.
“Combining networks and physical and virtual systems management in our integrated platform [will enable] customers to leverage a comprehensive fault and performance solution to efficiently manage expanding virtual environments,” Pilc said in a statement.
CA also is giving service providers more support for their MPLS networks. CA officials said that businesses are adopting IP services running over MPLS networks, and that their Spectrum Infrastructure Manager MPLS Transport Manager will help TI administrators discover and monitor the networks, and find faults that could degrade the delivery of services.
For carrier-class telecommunications infrastructures, CA’s new release of eHealth Performance Manager will support the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM Element Management System, identifying degradations in the core switches before services are disrupted.
Other upgrades in eHealth Performance Manager include tighter integrations with eHealth Traffic Accountant for network traffic and domains, and with eHealth Database Performance Option for managing the performance of databases for multiple vendors.
The new release also will including performance management for IP telephony applications based on Cisco’s United Communications Manager and Siemens’ HiPath voice systems.