CA Technologies Next-Generation Automation Suite Helps Accelerate the Journey from Virtualization to Cloud Computing

October 18, 2010 No Comments

SOURCE: CA Technologies

CA Technologies 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

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