CA, Network Appliance announce integration of BrightStor, NetApp storage solutions

Computer Associates International, Inc, the world`s leading provider of e-business management solutions, and Network Appliance, Inc, a leading provider of enterprise network storage solutions, announced the integration of Network Appliance storage solutions with both CA`s state-of-the-art BrightStor Portal and BrightStor Storage Resource Manager (BrightStor SRM) solutions.

Combined, the solutions provide customers with an integrated, open and scalable solution to centrally manage multiple NetApp storage appliances.

CA`s BrightStor Storage Resource Manager 6.3 now also delivers integrated support for NetApp storage appliances. BrightStor SRM integrates the monitoring of heterogeneous storage environments, as well as the execution of administrative tasks such as capacity planning. By consolidating such tasks onto a single console environment, BrightStor SRM enables IT groups to leverage skills and lower training and maintenance costs.

"As organisations assimilate new storage technologies in order to cope with their growing volumes of critical data, they must develop strategies to effectively manage these technologies in conjunction with existing assets - while keeping their overall IT operational costs down," said Russell Artzt, executive vice president, CA. "By working closely with storage innovators like Network Appliance, CA is providing these essential storage management capabilities to customers around the world."

CA and Network Appliance are working jointly to deliver best-in-class solutions that enable customers to efficiently address their rapidly expanding storage and data protection requirements. Demonstrating the functional strength of the integration, the NetApp storage appliances have been certified ca smart with BrightStor Portal. The ca smart seal is earned by solution partners who deliver e-business value and technical excellence through the integration of their technologies with CA solutions.

"Enterprise data continues to proliferate at an explosive pace, and comprehensive storage strategies are critical to customers who seek business continuity, higher productivity, reduced total cost of ownership, and high return on investment," said Ray Villeneuve, vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "Together, Network Appliance and CA are delivering powerful, integrated storage solutions that meet the strategic, technical, and operational requirements of demanding enterprise architectures, and help customers make the most of their storage investments."

"Storage management needs to be just as powerful and robust as network and systems infrastructure management," said Jamie Gruener, senior analyst at Yankee Group. "The collaborative work of Computer Associates and Network Appliance to advance the state of storage management bodes well for enterprise customers, who expect that their storage resources can be managed just as easily as the balance of their IT investments."

BrightStor Portal, a key element of CA`s vision of "Managing Storage without Boundaries," supports a broad range of industry-leading storage hardware and software products. It provides a single-point-of-management for the controlling and monitoring of data, applications and storage subsystems, including large-scale network-attached storage (NAS) environments. It also provides practical, customisable reporting capabilities that help ensure optimised administration of storage assets across the enterprise.

BrightStor SRM provides centralised scheduling and automation of storage management operations to optimise storage resources and ensure business continuity. CA and Network Appliance collaborated on BrightStor SRM 6.3 to provide a single global view of NetApp storage appliances as part of the overall enterprise storage infrastructure. In addition to the new support for NetApp storage appliances, customers will now be able to extend comprehensive support of BrightStor SRM to file systems, applications and storage systems from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to networked storage, including NAS platforms. The cross-platform support of BrightStor SRM enables easy identification, classification, and management of business-critical data residing on NetApp devices in order to help protect the continuous availability of data, servers and applications. Special support is provided for backup and recovery, databases, and messaging/collaboration applications.