Enterprise data continues to proliferate at an explosive pace, and comprehensive data storage strategies are critical to organisations that seek business continuity, higher productivity, reduced total cost of ownership and high returns on investment.
To meet these requirements, Computer Associates (CA) has unveiled its vision for "Managing Storage without Boundaries," which, it says, will enable CA customers to take a platform-neutral approach to the management of their enterprise-wide data storage resources.
"Storage management needs to be just as powerful and robust as network and systems infrastructure management," says Dion Gerrans, regional account manager, Computer Associates (Africa). "The cost-efficient provisioning of storage growth and the effective management of data storage resources are strategic to today`s e-businesses and have to progress well beyond the `point` solutions used by most organisations in the past.
"These solutions are now inadequate and unable to deliver the essential efficiency and end-to-end manageability that is required today," he says.
Key enabler
One of the key enablers of CA`s vision is its BrightStor Portal. It builds upon CA`s two decades of platform-neutral management tools development, as well as the company`s Web portal technology.
According to CA, the result is a flexible, scalable platform that simplifies the management of storage resources across heterogeneous protocols and multivendor hardware - thereby lowering operational costs and ensuring that storage resources are utilised more effectively.
"The complexity of our customers` enterprise storage environments will continue to increase as new technologies such as SANs and Infiniband emerge to help them cope with escalating storage requirements," says Gerrans.
"CA`s BrightStor Portal will enable them to more easily assimilate these new technologies and enjoy their benefits - without creating unacceptable management burdens and escalating management costs in the process."
Built on CA`s CleverPath Portal, BrightStor Portal supports CA`s move towards the integration of heterogeneous environments through open, standards-friendly solutions.
According to Gerrans, It can be easily customised to add support for new vendors, devices, applications and various protocols. It can also scale to accommodate large and diverse enterprise storage environments.
"Through integration with leading storage hardware and software products, BrightStor Portal consolidates vital storage information across the enterprise and presents it in a highly intuitive, graphical and business-oriented manner.
"This simplified, integrated presentation enables managers to make smarter, better-informed decisions that eliminate wasteful spending and reduce total ownership costs," he says.
Storage automation
Another element in CA`s Managing Storage without Boundaries vision is a new class of storage management solutions that CA calls "Enterprise Storage Automation".
CA says Enterprise Storage Automation provides the functional intelligence, dynamic storage provisioning, policy definitions and other advanced capabilities necessary to shield operations staff from the complexities of underlying storage infrastructures.
"These solutions enable administrators to manage and visualise storage from a true business perspective, rather than a purely technical one," notes Gerrans. "This approach is significantly more effective than the `bottom-up` approach that characterises most of the solutions available today."
Gerrans says Enterprise Storage Automation also brings the management of storage into better alignment with the management of other key enterprise IT resources such as systems and network infrastructures.
Network appliance integration
Complementing the Managing Storage without Boundaries vision has been CA`s recent collaboration Network Appliance, a leading provider of enterprise network storage solutions.
In terms of an agreement between these two companies, Network Appliance storage solutions will be integrated with both CA`s BrightStor Portal and BrightStor Storage Resource Manager solutions.
"Combined, the solutions will provide customers with an integrated, open and scalable solution to centrally manage multiple NetApp storage appliances," says Gerrans.
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.
CA says that by consolidating such tasks onto a single console environment, BrightStor SRM enables IT groups to leverage skills and lower training and maintenance costs.
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.
Functional strength
Demonstrating the functional strength of the integration, the NetApp storage appliances have been certified "ca smart" with BrightStor Portal. Gerrans reveals that 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.
"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," he adds.
"By working closely with storage innovators like Network Appliance, CA is providing these essential storage management capabilities to customers around the world."
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