CA has announced 12 new and updated Enterprise IT Management products that will help enterprises and service providers gain increased business value from virtualised environments.
CA's solutions allow organisations to realise greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from virtualised computing environments through comprehensive capabilities for IT management, governance, automation and security.
“CA Enterprise IT Management customers can achieve a balance between control and business agility when managing virtualised resources and systems,” said Hannes Lategan, CA Southern Africa's solution strategist. “CA solutions build on the management capabilities within popular virtualisation platforms, but then extend those with enterprise-class, heterogeneous management for improved overall business results.”
Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualisation, with 31% of operating system instances virtualised in 2008 and growing to 54% in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision-makers in North America and Europe, conducted by Forrester Research*.
By simplifying and automating the management of virtualised and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualisation more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments - this is done with a focus on the services supporting the business. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology to cater for virtualisation. This strategy, however, still includes solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.
New, enhanced products from CA help reduce business risks, increase benefits of virtualisation
New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:
* New: CA Spectrum Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualisation of infrastructure across silos in the context of IT services. It offers a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.
* CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralised application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualisation deployments and enable quicker server recovery. IT is able to analyse application and infrastructure performance and apply policy-based actions to dynamically meet the load demand on infrastructure according to business requirements. The solution allows for a modular approach, making it possible for you to automate your environment at your pace.
* CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA's virtualisation management capabilities in support of “green IT”. As in the past, CA is committed to integrating with and lending value to solutions from infrastructure vendors.
* CA Insight Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows; Oracle; SQL Server and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments - even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion - without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for “at-a-glance” problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.
In additional announcements last week, CA announced other new and updated products that help improve the management of virtualised environments, including:
Security and compliance
* CA Access Control 12.5 with new features to deliver comprehensive privileged user management and enhanced host access control;
* Improved integration of CA Identity Manager 12.5 and CA Role & Compliance Manager 12.5 for more streamlined identity life cycle management, including innovative Smart Provisioning capabilities;
* CA DLP 12.0 with extended discovery, protection, and control of sensitive data, and new integrations to complementary solutions;
* CA Records Manager 12.6 with additional features for information governance and content protection, as well as addressing compliance demands; and
* CA Governance, Risk & Compliance Manager 2.5 (CA GRC Manager) with new features to further strengthen its role as the primary platform for management of IT risk and compliance information and initiatives.
Governance
* CA Clarity Project and Portfolio Management helps IT to make strategic decisions about how resources are deployed and what can and should be virtualised for greater return. New features available in CA Clarity PPM On Demand enhance the ease of use, simplify reporting, leverage industry best practices and allow for quick access to critical portfolio information.
Energy and sustainability management
* New: CA ecoMeter and CA ecoGovernance help enterprises to manage global sustainability initiatives, measure and report on energy and natural resource consumption, and help reduce energy costs across the data centre and facilities. With these new solutions, customers can reliably monitor and track their energy savings from server virtualisation.
* “The State Of Emerging Enterprise Hardware Trends: 2008 To 2009”, Forrester Research, February 27, 2009
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CA Southern Africa
CA Southern Africa is the sole representative of world-leading CA technology in sub-Saharan Africa and a member of the EOH group of companies.
CA Southern Africa is the IT management expert, merging international innovation with a world of local possibility. CA Southern Africa provides customers with a holistic and all-encompassing solution, which provides both traditional software based solutions as well as other outcomes-based services, which require little upfront investment and skills.
CA Southern Africa's solutions can be tailored to suit and address each individual business and allows them to choose how they would like to manage and run their IT, either internally or through the locally hosted CA Southern Africa facility.
EOH
EOH is a business and technology solutions provider creating lifelong partnerships by developing business and IT strategies, supplying and implementing solutions and managing enterprise-wide business systems and processes for medium to large clients.
EOH operates in the following three clusters of business units as a fully integrated business:
Technology - Through a number of subsidiary companies, EOH is able to sell, implement and support a range of world-class business applications, including ERP, CRM, business intelligence, advanced planning and scheduling, e-commerce and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Consulting - Concentrated under the EOH Consulting brand are business units offering services ranging from strategic and business process consulting, project services, change management, supply chain optimisation and education.
Outsourcing - EOH offers comprehensive maintenance and support of client's IT infrastructure and applications through the rendering of full IT outsourcing, application hosting and managed services. In addition, EOH offers full business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
EOH has a presence in all major centres in South Africa and operates in the rest of Africa.
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