CA and VMware today announced an expansion in their long-standing relationship centred around the creation and delivery of integrated management solutions to complement the VMware virtualisation platform. The relationship is aimed at helping enterprise IT organisations and cloud service providers manage virtualisation for maximum business impact, while extending its benefits beyond basic server consolidation and cost reduction. The companies plan to jointly develop a management solution to maximise IT agility, service quality, cost efficiency and risk avoidance.
As a first step, CA and VMware have signed an agreement to make CA Data Centre Automation Manager interoperable with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed to enable enterprises and cloud service providers to seamlessly provision applications and resources from both corporate data centre and service provider clouds. It is intended to help customers efficiently and safely test, stage and deploy complex applications within virtual environments, and allow applications hosted on virtualised servers to be operational-ready and able to be monitored and secured quickly to speed deployment.
The joint solution extends CA's strength in delivering leading end-to-end enterprise software change, configuration and release management through CA Software Change Manager and CA Data Centre Automation Manager. These products optimise the entire development process through effective collaboration, lifecycle automation, standards enforcement, and configuration audit and control.
VMware Stage Manager leverages VMware Infrastructure to enable IT and application administrators to accelerate release management activities, streamlining the resources and processes required to move a business application through integration, test, and staging and ultimately deploy it into production. VMware Stage Manager also reduces the risks associated with change-related downtime by enabling IT to easily clone entire multi-tier systems, allowing exact replicas of the production environment to be used throughout the release process.
CA Data Centre Automation Manager is a key component of CA's cloud management strategy announced yesterday. In September 2008, VMware announced its plans to expand VMware Infrastructure into a comprehensive virtual data centre operating system (VDC-OS). The VDC-OS is intended to allow businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources - servers, storage and network - into an aggregated on-premise cloud and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.
“Many of our shared enterprise customers have moved beyond using virtualisation for server consolidation and cost savings, and are using CA's virtualisation management technologies to achieve significant business value,” stated Ajei Gopal, executive vice-president of CA's EITM Group. “With the combination of CA and VMware's management and virtualisation technologies, enterprises and cloud providers are able to apply informed automation in real-time to achieve dramatically improved business agility, service quality and cost efficiency.”
“Our partnership with CA enables customers to transform their IT operations by deploying VMware technologies across IT disciplines, along with leading management technologies, to drive improved service delivery to the business,” said Brian Byun, vice-president of global partners and solutions, VMware. “We look forward to combining the strength of VMware Stage Manager and CA Data Centre Automation Manager to enable rapid provisioning of development and production applications for our joint customers.”
Other key highlights of the CA and VMware relationship
* CA has integrated CA Data Centre Automation Manager with VMware vCenter to enable IT organisations to provision, manage change, and automatically allocate resource pools in virtual and physical environments. The combination uniquely allows enterprise data centre operations to dynamically react in real-time based on systems and application performance information provided by CA eHealth Network Performance Manager, CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager, CA NSM, CA Wily Application Performance Management, and CA AutoSys Workload Automation.
* VMware vCenter capabilities are extended by CA Advanced Systems Management to enable IT organisations to discover, monitor, track and optimise performance and utilisation of both virtual and physical servers for integrated systems management. The combination of CA's Dynamic Resource Brokering technology and VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler capability offers customers unmatched resource utilisation and system reliability as well as superior product application performance.
* CA is a member of the VMware Ready Programme for management solutions, a new ecosystem initiative to provide integrated solutions for VMware environments. CA also participates in the VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative, with active programmes delivering business results in the areas of infrastructure management and business continuity.
For more information about how CA's EITM solutions maximise the business value of virtualisation, please visit http://www.ca.com/virtual.
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