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Computer Associates International Inc. on Wednesday threw the weight of 23 new products behind Linux, further fueling its momentum as an enterprise-ready platform for mission critical applications.
The new CA Linux offerings bring CAs total to 54 either shipping or in beta testing. The products are distributed across CAs six major focus areas, including enterprise management; storage management; security management; data management and application development; application life cycle management; and portals and business intelligence.
“Weve made a really solid statement,” said John Pincomb, vice president of ebusiness solutions platforms at CA, in Islandia, N.Y. “We are always inventing new technologies, but we have a strong base in place, so that companies are in a position to have the basic management tools they need to do enterprise management functions, security, storage and data management.”
The new offerings support all of the major Linux distributions, including Caldera, Red Hat, SuSE and TurboLinux.
Among the new enterprise management tools for Linux is a new job scheduling agent that allows operators to schedule batch processing jobs across multiple processors, including Linux servers. The Unicenter Universal Job Management Agent 1.0 works across Linux, Unix, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. At the same time, CA announced that its Unicenter AutoSys Job Management tool will work across all Linux distributions as well as other enterprise platforms. CAs Unicenter 3.0 systems management software also adds support for managing Linux on IBM mainframes.
The outpouring of Linux support among enterprise management software providers signals that “Fortune 500 companies are beginning to take it seriously,” said Murray Berkowitz, senior vice president of advanced technology for CA. “Its signaling the fact that Linux is a viable platform on the distributed or the mainframe side. The mainframe holds the biggest consolidation promise for server farms.
“If you cant manage it, you cant deploy it,” he said.
Earlier this week, rival BMC Software Inc. announced its own series of management offerings for Linuxon both mainframe and distributed platforms. Separately, IBMs Tivoli unit has released Linux support across all four of its major management disciplines (storage management, security management, performance and availability management, and configurations and operations management), according to Bob Yellin, vice president of technology for Tivoli in Austin, Texas.
“Were 80 to 90 percent of the way there. All the enterprise vendors are responding to what the market is asking for,” said Yellin. “Our commitment is to support Linux on the same basis as Windows NT and Unix in its different flavors.”
In its other areas, CA added Linux storage management support in its BrightStor ARCserve Backup, BrightStor Enterprise Backup and other BrightStor tools. The company extended its security management offerings to Linux through the eTrust Antivirus, eTrust Policy Compliance, eTrust Audit, eTrust Directory and eTrust Access Control software.
Other CA software that is gaining Linux support includes the following:
— Advantage Ingres Enterprise Relational Database
— AllFusion Harvest Change Manager
— CleverPath Portal.