CA Expands Offerings For Unified Business Service Assurance

CA has announced an innovative strategy for optimising IT services by improving the management of next-generation virtualised data centres and private clouds. CA’s solution for unified business service assurance and automation will involve coupling availability and performance management for VMware vSphere 4 environments and Cisco virtualised network switches.

CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The solution will help enable customers to coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a unified information model.

“With the integration of the Cisco Nexus 1000V with VMware vSphere 4, the lines between physical and virtual network and systems management have blurred,” said Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit. “CA’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will provide a closed-loop approach to business service assurance and automation.”

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will deliver event correlation and root-cause analysis that reduces ‘noise’ by suppressing symptomatic alarms. The products will also deliver ‘deviation-from-normal’ proactive performance management of virtual environments that helps identify performance issues before users and services are impacted. In addition, they are designed to deliver live interactive reporting for troubleshooting, as well as historical trend reports for capacity planning.

CA’s object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centres, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure.

An enhanced automated discovery of the integrated physical and virtual network and systems environment will minimize manual efforts and help ensure an accurate understanding of the virtualized infrastructure.