Published: January 28 2010, 04:44 PM | no comments
by Stephen Elliot

We’re excited to announce that our board has unanimously elected Bill McCracken as CA’s chief executive officer. Bill has been CA’s interim CEO since John A. Swainson’s retirement was announced in September 2009.

To learn more about the beginning of this new chapter in CA history, visit the press release, view his bio, or check out the recent clean energy interview he had with CNBC in December.

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Published: January 12 2010, 10:51 AM | no comments
by Fabrizio Giamello

Whether your IT organization supports a commercial business or a government entity, there is low tolerance for infrastructure degradation and outages.  In one case your inadequate performance will hinder your company's ability to compete (and potentially will have a negative effect on revenue generation). In another case public safety might be put at risk.

Despite what is at stake, Enterprise Management Associates reported in a 2008 survey that 54% of applications-related problems were first reported by users.  This means that for one of every two problems the IT organizations interviewed were playing catch up; they had no idea that performance was degraded and had to rush analyzing those issues while the users were already being affected.

Advanced infrastructure performance management enables IT organizations to spot performance trends and correct infrastructure problems before degradations escalate to noticeably impact users or deny service.  Advanced thresholding algorithms, combined with live and historical performance, capacity and utilization reporting, and advance notification, can transform IT Operations from reactive to proactive - resulting in improved service quality and staff efficiency.

CA eHealth Performance Manager (PM) provides a complete view of physical and virtual infrastructure health, monitoring multi-vendor, multi-technology networks and systems, databases and applications, all of which can affect service quality. CA eHealth PM collects performance data, evaluates it for threshold violations and issues early warnings in real time so you can address problems before they become critical.  The proactive intelligence is based on the solution's time-over-threshold and deviation-from-normal algorithms that are used to understand exceptions in a historical context and assure that only persistent degradation problems are reported.

CA eHealth PM's unparalleled capabilities and proven scalability make it a natural choice for corporations and government organizations alike.  In fact today nine of top 10 global Telco Service Providers¹ are relying on CA eHealth PM to guarantee the delivery of their contracted level of service to hundreds of millions of combined commercial and consumer customers, while the four largest US Federal Agencies² use it to carry out their vital missions.

(¹) By revenues, according to the 2009 Fortune Global 500 Industry Ranking

(²) By number of civilian personnel, according to the US Office of Personnel Management records.

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Published: January 04 2010, 07:39 AM | no comments
by Lakshmi Pedda

Server virtualization technology has had a major affect on data centers in the last 24 months, and more changes are on the way. Here are five trends that will likely shape the future of enterprise computing:

Trend No. 1: Virtual server backup
Expect an evolution rather than a revolution for virtual backups. As virtualization tools continue to evolve, backup tools will become more extensible, interoperable and transparent. Backup agents will become more efficient, reducing their installation footprint on individual virtual machines (VMs).

Trend No. 2: IT staffing
On-going concern with the global economy and a tighter business focus on IT will keep head counts tight to a large extent. However, well-trained and motivated people will continue to play a crucial role in provisioning, management and maintenance activities. Expect companies to increasingly turn to staffing of critical technologies, considering their rapid deployment in data centers - revenue-producing projects that are vital to the bottom line.

Trend No. 3: Virtualization management
With the maturation of the technology, expect to see a wide range of server virtualization monitoring and management tools. Some offerings will continue to cover narrow niches, but most harness the wealth of system data collected by the hypervisor. Expect future tools to integrate with other infrastructure elements, such as storage and network components. The goal is to monitor the infrastructure through a single dashboard.

Administrators should expect to see more automation features too, allowing the assignment of more resources to a virtualized application or the migration of an application to another server when certain utilization parameters occur. This kind of behavior will reduce direct human interaction and rein in costs, while making a data center more adaptive. Automation will also extend to users - allowing employees, customers and partners to set up and provision their own environments or applications.

Trend No. 4: Configuration management
Expect more features and functionality, as monitoring, paging, alerting and offline patching are being incorporated into configuration management tools. Expect a tighter integration of configuration management capabilities into operating systems or hardware devices, as well.

Trend No. 5: Networking technologies
Many new possibilities exist for interconnecting virtual and physical networks. Much of the traditional physical network access layer, including switches, security and eventually routing functions, are moving to support the virtual infrastructure given the architectural and administrative flexibility and improvements in VM mobility they afford. At the same time, it creates new management and IT procedural challenges that will have to be addressed. Also, security audit and compliance standards, as well as interpretations, will catch up to the new technology. Once they do, we'll be at a point where we'll view traditional physical network infrastructure and supporting physical appliances as legacy devices.

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