CA Technologies Next-Generation Automation Suite Helps Accelerate the Journey from Virtualization to Cloud Computing
New and Enhanced Products and Solution Bundles Help Tame Complexity of Managing Hybrid Physical, Virtual and Cloud-based IT Infrastructures and the Business Services they Support
ISLANDIA, N.Y., Oct. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) today announced a next-generation CA Automation Suite to help customers with their journey to a virtualized, dynamic cloud computing infrastructure. The Suite is designed to offer a comprehensive, business service-centric approach to the dynamic deployment and elastic scaling of IT infrastructure and services by automating, orchestrating, integrating and standardizing the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources.
"Enterprise data center virtualization and cloud computing strategies are being rapidly implemented across heterogeneous physical and virtual infrastructures," said Mary Johnston Turner, research director, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. "These new computing architectures significantly complicate many activities, such as application and server provisioning, and change management. Automated provisioning solutions are needed to help IT teams address these challenges. The CA Automation Suite targets many of these requirements while providing customers with modular implementation options designed to deliver value quickly and allowing customers to ramp up use of automation at a pace that makes sense for their business."
The CA Automation Suite is designed to offer a comprehensive solution to help solve the most challenging IT operational tasks. Designed with unified physical and virtualization management in mind, the Suite provides a clear path toward helping enterprises accelerate the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing.
"MGM Resorts deployed components of the CA Automation Suite in early 2010 in order to standardize and streamline physical and virtual server provisioning and life-cycle management activities," said Chris Gebelin, executive director - enterprise management of MGM Resorts International. "Our investment in the CA Technologies automation solutions has enabled us to improve staff productivity and IT resource utilization."
The CA Automation Suite features two new products and enhancements to four other products. All the products may be purchased and implemented separately or in three new pre-integrated solutions designed for critical use-case requirements: hybrid clouds, Cisco UCS, and data centers.
Business Service Automation
-- NEW: CA Process Automation helps reduce operational expenses, increase
staff productivity and increase speed in delivering IT services by
documenting, automating, and orchestrating a range of processes across
platforms, applications, and IT groups. Key features include a graphical
designer interface, over 50 CA Technologies and third-party pre-built
data connectors, and visual exception handling. These features provide
context to the architects of the tasks being automated and help enable
quicker results.
-- NEW: CA Configuration Automation is designed to enable greater
standardization of IT services, reduced downtime, and increased
compliance with regulatory and IT security policies by providing
application and system discovery and dependency mapping across a range
of applications and distributed physical and virtual servers. Key
features include granular configuration tracking and auditing; more than
1000 out-of-the-box application, service and system templates and
policies; and the flexibility of using either agent or agent-less
approaches.
-- CA Workload Automation automates and optimizes the scheduling of
enterprise workloads, helping IT meet service level objectives of
mission critical workloads. The solution can be hosted and managed from
both mainframe and distributed platforms, offering choice and
flexibility to data center managers. New capabilities include enhanced
agents that support more than 50 job types; dynamic management of mixed
workloads for virtualized resources; and the ability to schedule
workloads in public clouds such as Amazon EC2, manage business workloads
and IT services as a single process, and monitor an entire business
process and perform impact and root cause analysis in the event of a job
failure.
Infrastructure Automation
-- CA Virtual Automation provides self-service and automated virtual server
provisioning using an integrated self service reservation system; built
in templates and reports for chargeback; and public, private, and hybrid
cloud support, including the ability to directly provision applications
into Amazon EC2. New capabilities include support for hypervisors such
as Microsoft Hyper-V and support for Amazon VPC.
-- CA Server Automation dynamically provisions, patches, and deploys
applications and services across physical and virtual systems based on
standard templates and key performance metrics. New capabilities include
support for new hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V and support for
Cisco UCS.
-- CA Client Automation (formerly CA IT Client Manager) integrates and
automates a wide range of client device management tasks such as bare
metal buildups and rebuilds, patch management, migration to Windows 7
and remote desktop support. New capabilities include application
virtualization management, VMware VDI linked clone management, and
business reporting options.
New Pre-Integrated Solutions
-- CA Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds is designed for enterprises
interested in building an internal private cloud and also potentially
planning to leverage a public cloud as a part of their data center
strategy. CA Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds helps standardize IT
service delivery to business customers through a unified, self-service
reservation system and seamless administration. The integrated solution
includes three automation products: CA Process Automation, CA Server
Automation, and CA Virtual Automation; and CA Service Catalog and
Accounting.
-- CA Automation Suite for Cisco UCS is designed for enterprises scaling
out a Cisco UCS solution in their data centers that needs heterogeneous
configuration and provisioning support and industrial-grade scalability.
The integrated solution includes joint CA Technologies and Cisco
developed content for CA Configuration Automation, CA Process
Automation, CA Server Automation, and CA Virtual Automation that enables
images to be moved to Cisco UCS from non-Cisco UCS servers.
-- CA Automation Suite for Data Centers is designed for enterprises looking
to maximize the benefits of managing integrated physical and virtual
infrastructure and preparing to take advantage of cloud computing's
benefits. This integrated solution, previously called CA Spectrum
Automation Manager, is comprised of CA Configuration Automation, CA
Process Automation, CA Server Automation, and CA Virtual Automation.
"The promise of greater agility, increased ROI and improved resource utilization is driving rapid implementation of virtualization and cloud computing initiatives across enterprise data centers," said Roger Pilc, general manager of Virtualization and Automation, CA Technologies. "However, this results in an additional layer of management complexity that can constrain IT's ability to meet business needs. 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."
For more information about the CA Automation Suite, visit http://www.ca.com/us/service-automation.aspx. Demonstrations are available at the CA Technologies booth (PS2) at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010 today through October 21. In addition, Gebelin will discuss MGM Resorts' use of the CA Automation Suite at the event. His joint session with Pilc, "Quit Stalling: Overcoming the Barriers to Broad-based Virtualization Deployments," will be held October 19 at 12:30 p.m. ET.
Additional Resources
-- Blog: CA on Virtualization and Automation
-- Product Demonstration: CA Automation Suite for Data Centers
-- Twitter: @CAvirtualAuto
-- White Paper: CA Automation Suite Paves the Way for the Cloud
-- White Paper: Workload Automation for the Cloud
-- Video: Automation: Pre-requisite to the Cloud
-- Executive Brief: Automating Service Delivery
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments - from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at http://www.ca.com.
Follow CA Technologies
-- Twitter
-- Social Media Page
-- Press Releases
-- Podcasts