CA unifies e-business storage solutions under new BrightStor brand

Computer Associates (CA), the world`s leading provider of e-business management solutions, has announced that it is unifying and extending its broad range of industry-leading e-business storage solutions under its new BrightStor brand.

The BrightStor portfolio delivers highly scalable storage management across mobile-to-mainframe platforms, enabling organisations to protect, manage and integrate valuable data assets with optimum reliability and operational efficiency.

Computer Associates also announced the availability of the first product released under the BrightStor brand, BrightStor Enterprise Backup. BrightStor Enterprise Backup delivers "hot" online backup of relational databases at an unparalleled rate of 1.56 terabytes-per-hour, according to Doculabs, Inc, an independent analyst and advisory firm. Such high performance can significantly reduce backup windows, making data readily available for critical e-business operations.

"Storage clearly represents one of the most significant areas of IT investment for customers in all market segments, and the management of increasing volumes of critical data has become one of the most important tasks for IT management," said CA President and CEO Sanjay Kumar.

"The breadth and technical sophistication of CA`s BrightStor portfolio, combined with CA`s historical strength in enterprise e-business management, enable us to provide very robust and comprehensive solutions for these pressing storage challenges."

BrightStor enables e-business continuity for the extended enterprise by providing cross-platform, integrated software solutions for:

• .         Data Management, to ensure complete enterprise-wide data availability through backup/recovery, hierarchical storage management and archiving.

• .         Enterprise Storage Resource Management, to optimise the administration of storage assets and data through SAN and device management, media management and application control.

• .         Storage Infrastructure, to extend core storage software through data replication and virtualisation.

• .         Centralised Enterprise Storage Management, to optimise integration, automation and control of global storage resources through CA`s advanced portal technologies.

According to the Hurwitz Group, the world`s current yearly production of print, film, optical and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage -- which is approximately 250MB for each person on earth. Data protection requirements are expected to increase dramatically over the next few years.

"Storage is growing much faster than the availability of people to manage it," said David G Hill, research director, Storage and Storage Management, Aberdeen Group. "Storage management software - such as CA`s BrightStor family of solutions - delivers automation and productivity to meet that management challenge. With products that cover a wide range of platforms and storage management needs, BrightStor promises to bring brighter days to overburdened storage professionals."

The BrightStor portfolio encompasses a broad range of storage solutions for distributed platforms, such as Unix, Linux and Windows NT, and mainframe platforms such as OS/390, z/OS, z/VM, VM and VSE. BrightStor solutions also support today`s networked storage architectures, including server-attached storage, SANs and network-attached storage (NAS).

As networked storage continues to evolve with new architectures and offerings, CA is working with partners to ensure full integration of its BrightStor applications with system and storage platforms and networks. In conjunction with today`s release of BrightStor Enterprise Backup, CA announced partnership agreements with Brocade Communications Systems Inc, EMC Corporation, Emulex Corporation and Network Appliance, Inc.