CA Expands Centrally Managed, Multi-Vendor Platform Coverage for Virtual Server Environments

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA) today announced that CA Advanced Systems Management (CA ASM) now integrates with VMware VirtualCenter and supports Sun’s Logical Domains (LDOM). In addition to expanded centrally managed, multi-vendor platform coverage, CA ASM r11.2 provides unique insight for virtual and cluster environments through physical-to-virtual mapping of the entire enterprise server infrastructure. This functionality helps customers continuously assess, manage and optimize virtual system resources to ensure service availability.

CA ASM r11.2 is among eight new and updated products announced by CA today that help customers lower IT operations costs, manage risk, and improve security and compliance processes. The products support CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision by providing customers with the capabilities they need to better govern, manage and secure IT for better business results.

“As server virtualization continues to go mainstream, management of heterogeneous environments that utilize various technologies from vendors like VMware, Sun, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Veritas and Symantec is an important consideration,” said Paula Daley, vice president of product marketing for CA. “CA ASM r11.2 continues CA’s commitment to providing a vendor- and platform-neutral solution that streamlines the management of complex physical and virtual environments. The integration with VMware VirtualCenter and support for Sun’s LDOM makes it easier than ever for customers to leverage our centrally managed solution to improve operational efficiency, reduce risks and manage costs.”

As virtualization implementations continue to accelerate, the management requirements associated with these efforts are garnering more attention and budget from enterprise IT organizations. With IT organizations accelerating their deployment of virtualization technology into production environments, a series of new issues is coming to the forefront, specifically the management of virtual infrastructure and the need for appropriate benchmarks that enable more efficient operations. Companies need to define how successful management of virtualized deployments affects IT staff and administration ratios, cost savings, strategic planning processes and process reengineering.*

CA ASM r11.2 integrates comprehensively with VMware VirtualCenter, enabling administrators to provision, monitor and manage their virtual data centers through a single interface, and improves monitoring and management of VMware ESX hosts. The products complement each other by leveraging the unique combination of CA ASM’s patented Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB) and VMware’s Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS), part of the VMware Infrastructure virtualization platform, which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently aligns resources with business needs and changing priorities. This combination allows users to maximize the utilization of physical and virtual machines in VMware ESX environments using intelligent policy-driven automation based on changing business conditions. This results in improved server performance, utilization rates and availability.

“VMware and CA have been collaborating for years to develop product integrations that help customers effectively deploy, optimize, manage and secure virtual systems across the enterprise,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “The integration of CA ASM r11.2 with VMware’s VirtualCenter includes key management capabilities for customers adopting virtual infrastructure as a strategic IT platform. The solution provides application-level policies and enterprise-scale visibility across heterogeneous environments, and it is designed to help customers lower cost through higher utilization while managing application services levels.”

“CA ASM r11.2 was extremely easy to implement. It took us less than two hours to deploy the solution,” said Dr. Rolf Strotmann, vice president of Infrastructure Products Software and Solution Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “Thanks to its integration with VMware Virtual Center, the discovery of our Virtual Servers, Resource Pools, VMware Clusters, and VMware HA is done automatically. The improved ability to provide a single point of control and high transparency has enabled us to reduce the amount of time needed for monitoring and reporting on our complex environment by up to 30%.”

CA is currently the only management vendor to offer support for Sun’s LDOM platform, which is a significant option for customers interested in Sun® server consolidation initiatives. This support enables discovery and administration of the Sun virtual platform. It also offers performance and event management as well as dynamic reconfiguration of virtual resources.

Additional enhancements to CA ASM that customers have asked for include:

• High Availability for Clustering – IT departments can be assured that CA ASM will remain highly available in clustered environments providing for full failover capabilities. This improves reliability and reduces the risks associated with down-time.
• Enhanced Support for IBM’s® System p5 Server Series™ – CA made several enhancements for IBM System p5 Server monitoring, including VIO Server monitoring. VIO Server is a special partition on the IBM System p5 Server that facilitates resource sharing across various logical partitions (LPARs).
• Support for IBM’s HACMP™ Concurrent Resource Groups – With the addition of IBM's HACMP cluster technology, CA ASM now supports two different types of resource groups, concurrent and non-concurrent, which further expands CA ASM’s management capabilities.
• Enhanced CPU / Memory Monitoring – CA ASM now has the ability to perform selective monitoring of key system resources. This allows the user to disable the monitoring CPU and memory and filter out random spikes in performance data, reducing unnecessary alerts and associated tickets.
• Integration with CA eHealth Network Performance Manager (CA eHealth) – CA ASM’s agent for VMware ESX is now certified with CA eHealth. This allows customers using CA eHealth to gain the same insight about a VMware virtualized environment as the users of CA ASM. CA eHealth users can run reports on all the metrics available from a VMware ESX agent.

CA Services is available to provide comprehensive implementation services that enable CA ASM customers to accelerate the time to value of their investment, mitigate implementation risk and improve the alignment between IT and business processes.

“Understanding the maturity level of a customer’s IT environment and its associated business processes is the first step toward creating a centralized, proactive, self-managing solution,” said Mark Hounslow, Infrastructure Management global practice manager for CA Services. “CA Services brings the expertise necessary to analyze the customer’s business/IT environment and business processes, and uses this information to design and implement the right solution for the customer’s requirements. This includes installation and production rollout of CA ASM, as well as knowledge transfer to the customer’s in-house staff.”

For more information on CA Advanced Systems Management, please visit http://www.ca.com/us/systems-management.aspx.

* IDC, “Key IT and Business Benchmarks for Managing Virtual Infrastructure,” Doc # 205116, January 2007

About CA

CA (NASDAQ: CA), one of the world’s largest independent software companies, provides software solutions to unify and simplify™ IT management. With CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision and expertise, organizations can more effectively govern, manage and secure IT to optimize business performance and sustain competitive advantage. Founded in 1976, CA serves customers in virtually every country in the world. For more information, please visit www.ca.com.

Copyright © 2008 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Sun is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. IBM, System p5 and HACMP are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.