Forrester Research Inc. Principal Analyst Galen Schreck's November 17, 2010 blog post entitled "System Management Capabilities To Focus On For Ramping Up Virtualization In 2011" really hit home with me. He points out several important areas that are central to CA Technologies current and future efforts:
1. Integration of public and private cloud management
Galen rightly points out that virtualization tools are trending towards hybrid cloud management. This is a major part of the larger transition of IT from a one-stop internal shop to a broker of services that may be delivered either internally or from a cloud vendor. CA Technologies has already begun to facilitate that transition with a variety of functionality to support managing internal and external resources from a single location. Our CA Virtual Automation product can provision virtual machines into Amazon EC2 just as it provisions into internal virtual environments. This gives IT the power to instantly scale up capacity whenever needed and automate their virtual environment, all with the same tool.
In addition to provisioning into the data center or the cloud from a single location, CA 3Tera AppLogic allows organizations to rapidly deploy applications utilizing either internal physical resources or one of the dozens of MSPs running AppLogic. Need to move an application from the data center to the cloud? Simply select the application and change its resources from a physical grid to an MSP's systems with a few clicks. CA Technologies is dedicated to fighting tool sprawl by providing a broad portfolio of products that help consolidate the management of internal and external, and virtual and physical infrastructure.
2. Capacity planning and optimization
CA Technologies recent acquisition of Hyperformix speaks to how important we believe capacity management really is. Without purpose built tools, the benefits of virtualizing physical servers to improve their utilization can only be partially accomplished. Organizations also require capacity management tools that can understand three distinct environments: physical, virtual, and external cloud. With Hyperformix, you can dramatically improve the efficiency of IT staff dedicated to maximize the performance of your expensive IT investments.
3. Streamlining ongoing management of servers
Galen highlights three important areas here: standardizing an image library, automating management processes, and automating configuration management. CA Service Catalog in combination with CA Virtual Automation can help standardize a catalog of IT services that can be deployed with best practices baked in. IT can carefully monitor and track templates to ensure that configurations remain up-to-date and users can't provision templates without the latest patches and updates. CA Virtual Automation can then enable users to reserve resources in advance with built-in chargeback to give greater visibility into infrastructure costs. The combination allows both IT and its end-users to deploy resources more efficiently and effectively in order to drive business value.
CA Virtual Configuration is designed specifically to address many of the difficult problems of managing configuration in the virtual environment. Compliance is one of the largest concerns of many IT organizations, and CA Virtual Configuration is a critical tool in automating key configuration processes to keep up with the dynamic and ever-changing nature of virtual environments. Spreadsheets with configuration information, which were effective enough in a physical environment, are nearly impossible to maintain within a complex virtual environment. By automating these processes, organizations can save considerable man-power and dramatically reduce risk with a product like CA Virtual Configuration.
4. Real-time automation of workload management
Getting the most out of expensive investments in high-quality servers is a priority for all IT departments, especially as individual server capacity grows. In addition to Hyperformix to manage performance and capacity, CA Technologies offers CA Virtual Assurance and CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers to proactively monitor virtual and physical environments to prevent problems and provide accurate root cause analysis. These solutions provide the visibility and control of your virtual environment that, combined with automation and performance management, gives you end-to-end control of your virtual environment in order to maximize the utility of your hardware investments. As Galen writes, this will only get more important in the near future.
In short - CA Technologies is fully dedicated to being a leader in virtualization management. Many of the features and functionalities that will be critical in 2011 are available today, and new ones are on the way. But even more important, CA Technologies can be a key strategic partner in aligning IT to the business to show not only a financial return on IT investments, but also to help enable IT to become a key source of competitive advantage and business value.