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July 2011 - Posts

A solid choice for private clouds, CA Automation Suite for Clouds

Published: July 29 2011, 09:00 AM | no comments
by Yale Tankus

Many enterprises are at a point in time to where they need to make decisions about where to start with cloud computing. Some have already started projects in cloud computing but are unsure where the next best steps are. In my conversations with customers I've heard a few common themes emerge from both camps around private clouds:

  1. The top down business challenges have to be addressed, including rapid delivery of services while reducing the associated costs. "My business users are experimenting with new service offerings for our customers that may have a short life; we need to be able to rapidly enable those offerings and not charge them a ton of money."
  2. Leverage existing technology (hardware from multiple vendors, virtualization software, etc.) investments and continue with economies of consolidation. "I've spent a ton on hardware already and made a big investment in virtualization; how do I effectively provide services with these resources?"
  3. The need for a well defined set of use cases (best practices) out-of-the-box, combined with high degrees of integration between the components. "I've heard from the virtualization vendors, from hardware vendors and consultants, they don't have an out-of-the-box starting point that really manages physical and virtual well enough or it requires their hardware."
  4. The need to shrink consulting fees in order to get started with a private cloud. "Services engagements for private clouds are often open ended and it's not clear what the starting point is in terms of functionality and the costs are too high."
  5. The need to have flexibility and agility as requirements change.  "We need to be able to extend and modify our private cloud use cases/workflows easily and quickly to take advantage of hybrid and public cloud opportunities while still being able to manage our own private cloud."

CA Automation Suite for Clouds is a brand new solution that provides technology, best practices processes and services that enable customers to transform their existing IT infrastructures to deliver cloud services.  By combining leading technology with out-of-the-box processes and a small prescriptive consulting engagement, customers can now have a very specific starting point for a private cloud.  CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides heterogeneous support across hypervisors, servers, storage, network and public cloud resources. 

CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides customers with a solid foundation to rapidly deliver new revenue generating services while leveraging best practices and further extracting costs from their infrastructure.  Additional use cases and the move to hybrid and public cloud interoperability are accomplished by leveraging the existing implementation without having to start over.  CA Automation Suite for Clouds is extensible in a straight forward manner by customers & partners so the private cloud can be run and optimized to deliver superior service. 

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By: Yale Tankus
Yale Tankus is Vice President of Business Development for CA Technologies Virtualization and Automation Customer Solutions Unit. His responsibilities include management of solutions initiatives with key global system integrator and OEM alliance partners, guiding development of the company’s IT process...
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(R)evolution in the Capacity Management Market

Published: July 28 2011, 01:19 PM | no comments
by Bruce Milne

Yesterday CA Technologies announced over 10 cloud products and solutions in one of the largest cross-company launches in the company's history. The new and enhanced solutions strengthen the breadth and depth of our offering, enabling us to deliver the most comprehensive portfolio of IT management products in the market.

With this launch, CA Technologies addresses the complexity surrounding the many choices available to customers with cloud computing, helping simplify "cloud choice" for enterprises and service providers alike. The overwhelming choice available today reflects a new era of heterogeneity that includes traditional, cloud and hybrid application environments. By providing solutions that meet customers at any stage of their journey to cloud, CA Technologies provides a rapid, predictable path to agility and comprehensive cloud services lifecycle management. CA Technologies supports the fundamentals of cloud lifecycle management, across the plan, design, deliver, secure and assure stages.

This launch also marks an exciting new milestone in the evolution of the capacity management market. We've seen in the market a rapid shift from customers who develop deep expertise in capacity planning and management, to a requirement for more automation and simplification. Today's capacity management customers are looking for recommendations from the experts on how to plan and manage capacity in their physical, virtual and cloud environments quickly and easily, without a requirement for advanced skills.

I'm pleased to announce the launch of CA Data Manager 4.3 and CA Virtual Placement Manager 1.0, each of which contain exciting new capabilities for simplifying virtual and cloud capacity management for our customers.

Data Manager 4.3 extends the powerful "Resource Score," a unique CA Technologies capability that provides a normalized measure of capacity and utilization for any component in the architecture, by incorporating this measure into Resource Score reports. These reports allow customers to easily and automatically monitor and manage the available capacity and utilization across their heterogeneous environments. Previously, customers would have to monitor their VMware, Windows, Unix and other servers independently, since the monitored metrics for each are inconsistent. With the Resource Score Reports, customers now get a consolidated, normalized view of all their resources, how they're being used, and where the opportunities are for consolidation. This enhances the manageability of a large infrastructure and lowers admin ratios, which saves real money. Only CA Technologies can provide this capability.

Also included in this release is the first version of CA Current Capacity Reporter, which provides a single pane of glass for customers to monitor the capacity consumption in all their various landscapes and to predict trends in utilization. It comes out of the box with dozens of prescribed reports, but also provides ultimate flexibility to customize reports for the customer's specific needs. Its role-based interface allows different dashboards to be delivered to different stakeholders at a level of depth that's appropriate to their needs. Many customers still don't have a good sense of how their resources are being used today; CCR provides a good first step for customers to get their arms around how their business services are consuming their infrastructure.

Virtual Placement Manager 1.0 sets a new bar for the capacity management market. It combines CA Technologies unique predictive analytics, our understanding of the performance and scalability of every component in the architecture, and a high degree of automation to deliver a prescription for optimal placement of workloads in the virtual infrastructure. What this means is that virtual administrators can now plan where to place workloads so that their business services perform optimally, not only now but in the future as well. Most placement solutions in the market today provide a best-fit placement for workloads now, but fail to accommodate the growth and behavior of the individual workloads. CA Technologies uses historical data about the workloads to understand how they will consume resources, and automatically generates a placement prescription that puts workloads in the right place at the right time to avoid contention for those resources.

To learn more, I encourage you to read two new solution briefs that discuss the topics of "Current Capacity Reporting" and "Virtual Placement and Balancing."

  • Current Capacity Reporting is a solution that comprises CA Data Manager, CA Current Capacity Reporter, and many other components that work together to deliver a comprehensive view of available capacity, current utilization, under- and over-utilized resources, and opportunities for consolidation. Every customer needs this capability in their Infrastructure and Operations organization. This solution brief is a great conversation starter.
  • Virtual Placement and Balancing is a solution that comprises CA Virtual Placement Manager, CA Data Manager and many other components to capture data about current workloads, normalize and correlate those data, and calculate the optimal placement of those workloads in the virtual environment now and in the future. Any customer who is deploying virtualization at a strategic level will see enormous value in this solution.

I would love to hear your views on the capacity management market and what you'd like to see from this technology.

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By: Bruce Milne
Bruce Milne is vice president of Product Management for CA Technologies. He joined CA Technologies via its acquisition of Hyperformix in November 2010. As vice president of Products and Marketing, Bruce was instrumental in establishing Hyperformix as a leading provider of capacity management software...
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Configuration Change and Application Dependency Mapping in the Age of Private Cloud

Published: July 28 2011, 06:56 AM | no comments
by Mike Odusami

As customers transition their IT strategies beyond efforts that are focused on server virtualization to private clouds and beyond, infrastructure discovery and configuration change management will continue to play an even more significant role across the generational move. Carry-over configuration management best practices in traditional IT operations management will place new demands on available tools as customers move to address the unique challenges of cloud management. Whilst these new challenges stem mostly from the dynamic and constantly changing relationships between application services and dependent components, and between physical host and guest virtual servers, operational tasks such as standardized base server configuration (which is a pre-requisite for gaining IT efficiency through automated provisioning in private clouds), and prevention of infrastructure outages and security compliance loopholes due to uncontrolled configurations are some of the new but long-standing IT challenges that a successful configuration management system can help address. The latter problem is well documented by various leading industry analysts as one of the largest causes of unplanned outages.

Customers are starting to take a second look at these problems and their existing solutions either prompted by technology re-assessment efforts in readiness for a broader private cloud initiative or due to plain inadequacy of currently implemented solutions. While reevaluating what vendors are offering today, they're well advised to consider various factors including:

  • Types of discovery mechanisms available - credentialed, agent-based or network traffic analysis
  • Depth and scope of information provided through discovery - platform coverage across physical and virtual infrastructure components and the depth of application configuration information captured
  • Out of the box content (aka blueprints, fingerprints or probes) provided for identifying and capturing configuration information in commercial of the shelf (COTS) applications, and the level of efforts required to identify custom applications
  • Ability to analyze collected data into useful information in forms of graphical relationship and dependency maps
  • And last but not the least the ability to support higher level IT management functions such as ITIL change management, configuration compliance and service assurance, in addition to enabling cloud initiatives

At CA Technologies, we view configuration management and application discovery dependency mapping as two sides of the same coin. And we've been hard at work bringing these technologies to the cloud era - re-architecting the solution for scalability, adding/Linux mainframe discovery support and new visualization UIs to support service impact analysis that is focused on addressing the unique configuration management challenges of virtual and private cloud infrastructure, amongst other new capabilities.

CA Configuration Automation 12.5 is included one of the many new and enhanced products and solutions announced yesterday that advance CA Technologies strategy for enabling cloud-connected enterprises and helping customers realize the business value of agility. It is our central product for configuration change management, application dependency mapping and configuration compliance. CA Configuration Automation adds some exciting new capabilities with this new release including:

  • Interactive Visualization UI - Discovered components and the relationships between them can be viewed in new visualization UI and topology maps which can be saved, printed or emailed. Visualization is further enhanced with over 75 predefined graphs and templates for servers, services, applications and software components. Templates are also provided for configuration, communication and virtualization relationships between discovered components as well as for rule compliance and change detection.
  • Expanded Discovery Capabilities
  • z/Linux Mainframe Discovery - z/Linux RedHat and SUSE based servers and applications discovery
  • Agentless Windows discovery with WMI Access Mode- Discovery and configuration data collection for Microsoft Windows platforms.
  • SUDO Discovery Access Mode - Enables access to UNIX/Linux server configuration and discovery data with non-root security privileges
  • Telnet/FTP Discovery Access Mode - Increases access methods especially for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and MSPs
  • Integration with CA Catalyst Connector - CA Configuration Automation now supports CA Catalyst integration platform which provides standards-compliant data integration to CA and 3rd party management solutions
  • Scalability Enhancements - Significantly reduced database overheads to enhance scalability and performance
  • New & updated Blueprints - New Blueprints extend support for current and latest release of software components. Web services access mode is also now available for Blueprint Discovery

Customers will continue to derive benefits from previously provided base functions such as change detection, scheduled configuration compliance scans with remediation option, CIS-based compliance policy contents, and interactive reports and dashboards with CA Business Intelligence.

CA Configuration Automation is available stand-alone to support data center analysis and assessment projects, and is also part of our Automation Suite Business Solutions, which include CA Automation Suite for Clouds and CA Automation Suite for Data Centers. Visit the solution's page on http://www.ca.com/us/products/detail/CA-Application-Configuration-Manager.aspx to download product information, including white papers and solutions briefs on how we address configuration management challenges in today's data centers.

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By: Mike Odusami
Mike is a senior product marketing manager and cloud automation evangelist at CA Technologies. Prior to this role, he was a market strategist for the CA Service Automation and CA Service Management solutions, providing strategic and tactical market analysis to help formulate product and marketing directions...
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Automation Suite for Clouds

Published: July 27 2011, 12:18 PM | no comments
by Bill Talbot

Are you satisfied with how quickly you're delivering IT services to your end users?

Despite all the hoopla and hype, this is what cloud computing boils down to and is the fundamental question that every IT pro should ponder in deciding if, when and how to move to a cloud-based delivery model. Cost savings and scalability are very attractive benefits of cloud computing. But for many companies, these are secondary to the benefits of accelerating service delivery and time-to-market- it's all about deployment speed and on-boarding applications more quickly.

CA Technologies recognizes and is responding to this need by today announcing CA Automation Suite for Clouds r1.0 , which is designed to help enterprises accelerate their transition to automated service delivery. CA Automation Suite for Clouds is an enterprise private cloud solution that enables agile, secure and scalable provisioning of cloud infrastructure for critical IT and business services. It provides users with a single, unified view and point of control across physical, virtual and private/public cloud resources. The catalog of applications and services, accessed through a secure, online portal, enables users to quickly select and provision the resources they need. Automation helps ensure that pooled resources are provisioned quickly, with minimal IT effort and service usage is metered and associated to departments, cost centers, or users for billing or chargeback. And, it offers pre-integrated workflows that are designed specifically to support best practice private cloud use cases, right out-of-the-box.

Figure 1: Integrated components of the CA Automation Suite for Clouds solution

Key cloud-enabling capabilities of this new solution include:

Self-Service - Self-service portal and integrated service catalog empower users to quickly and securely provision and de-provision their own resources and services-without directly involving IT staff. Native multi-tenancy enables publication of standardized services across multiple catalogs. Alternatively, localized or unique services can be published to one or more specific customers or business units; access to services is controlled using role-based permissions and workflows, regardless of business model.

Dynamic Resource and Workload Management - After a user service request is submitted, automation manages the entire cloud service workflow and lifecycle including checking resource availability, provisioning resources, validating configurations, and automating system stand-up and tear-down. The system also monitors and dynamically responds to key performance indicators with coordinated, policy-based action including provisioning, change, patch and clone management, and de-provisioning. Dynamic resource pool management helps to quickly scale capacity up or down depending on user demand to increase elasticity and utilization rates.

Flexible, On-demand Provisioning - Resources can be automatically provisioned on-demand via multiple methods or dynamically triggered based on the embedded monitoring of key performance metrics.

  • Policy-based automation is designed to facilitate consistent deployment of applications and services across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
  • Supports public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures including provisioning Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), and monitoring performance and utilization of Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instances.
  • Unique rapid server imaging technology can quickly capture, convert and migrate system images (including OS, applications, storage and network configurations) regardless of the underlying hardware platforms.

Service Metering and Billing - Powerful financial management supports fixed or usage-based pricing and includes a billing and financial reporting engine that automatically associates service usage to departments, cost centers, or customers/users. Integrated chargeback gives you the ability to charge for services based on their true cost of delivery. In addition, native cost allocation automatically values your services using a variety of standardized cost allocation methodologies. This distributes direct and indirect costs to consumers and calculates per-unit rates of consumption to aid in decision support.

Secure Delivery - Fine-grained entitlements enable administrators to create roles enabling policy-based access controls and service request approvals. User authentication includes integration with LDAP Directories and Microsoft Active Directory and can be used to enable secure visibility to published services by business unit and role.

Automated Storage Provisioning - Integration with NetApp® Provisioning Manager enables automated provisioning based on user-defined, storage policies for availability, performance, thin provisioning, replication, and disaster recovery. Create and manage NetApp-based storage library for applications/infrastructure sandboxes for use with private cloud IaaS services.

Automated Discovery, Configuration and Compliance Management - Capture data and dependency information into snapshots to establish configuration baselines and gold standards for continuous change tracking and to detect configuration drifts. Automatically discover network devices, servers, operating systems, applications, databases and middleware running in your infrastructure, inventory their configuration settings, and map discovered components to dependent IT services for change impact analysis.

 

Figure 2: CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides users with a single, unified view and point of control across physical, virtual and private/public cloud resources. The catalog of applications and services, accessed through a secure, online portal, empowers users to quickly select and provision the resources they need.

In essence, CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides a pre-tested and extensible framework designed for customers and partners to rapidly implement and accelerate time to value as they move toward delivering cloud-enabled services. In summary, it includes pre-designed workflows for automated, self-service delivery of virtual and physical infrastructure and application services, making it ideal for both delivering IaaS and automated cloud services today and into the future.

If you want to transform your existing environment to a private cloud, deploy a turnkey private cloud rapidly, or dynamically move workloads to private or public clouds as demand changes, you should take a close look at CA Automation Suite for Clouds as it offers a comprehensive, integrated solution for buiding, managing and securing cloud computing systems.

To learn more about our new CA Automation Suite for Clouds solution, please visit: http://www.ca.com/us/Hybrid-Cloud-Automation.aspx.

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By: Bill Talbot
Bill Talbot is a Product Marketing Manager for Automation solutions at CA Technologies. He has over 15 years of B-to-B marketing, sales and alliance development experience. Prior to CA Technologies, Bill founded and ran VIA Consulting, a marketing services firm that helped high tech businesses transition...
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When It Comes to Cloud, Choice is Key

Published: July 27 2011, 08:25 AM | no comments
by Bill Talbot

Everyone's talking cloud these days, but ask 100 people in IT what type of cloud computing model they have implemented, or plan to implement, and you'll probably get 100 different answers - public, private, hybrid; SaaS, PaaS, IaaS; cloud-in-a-box vs. dynamic data center. The list goes on and on. And that's the way it should be because when it comes to cloud, one size does not fit all. Some infrastructure, applications and workloads are better suited to run in-house in a private cloud environment vs. a public cloud and vice versa.

CA Technologies (CA) recognizes that customers want choice in their path to cloud computing and today announced new and enhanced solutions that help enterprises effectively deliver cloud services how, when and where they want.                                                                                                                   

Two Approaches to Delivering Cloud Computing

For customers looking to evolve to a private cloud model, CA Automation Suite for Clouds r1.0 is a brand new solution that helps companies transform their existing IT infrastructures to deliver cloud services by providing:

  • out-of-the-box cloud capabilities like self-service, resource pooling, dynamic provisioning and metering/billing
  • pre-integrated workflows that are designed specifically to support best practice infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) use cases
  • automated discovery, configuration and compliance management

The solution provides a pre-tested and extensible IaaS framework designed for customers and partners to rapidly implement and accelerate time to value as they deploy cloud-based services.

For customers willing to take a more greenfield approach to delivering cloud services, CA AppLogic r3.0 turn-key cloud platform is ideal for rapidly deploying applications on homogeneous x86 servers for on-demand delivery.  The platform virtualizes the application and its entire infrastructure, and abstracts it into a single object, which can be replicated or migrated very quickly.

Planning, Delivering and Assuring Clouds

Today's announcement also includes several new and enhanced virtualization,  automation and capacity management offerings that give customers choice when it comes to choosing solutions to help plan, deliver and assure the performance of cloud services being provided:

CA Virtual Placement Manager r1.0 is a brand new solution that uses advanced analytics specific to the virtual environment for optimal workload placement and right-sizing of virtual machines so you can optimize for service levels without over-provisioning.

CA Data Manager r4.3 provides a central repository for system performance and capacity data that allows you to automatically analyze your current utilization of resources and datacenter efficiency, and leverage the investment made in performance monitoring tools to determine future capacity of critical business and cloud services.

CA Server Automation r12.5 includes the ability to quickly provision servers and applications into and out of public clouds as well as between public cloud providers (i.e. cloud-to-cloud migration) such as Amazon, Rackspace and Verizon Terremark. Automated, dynamic storage provisioning in the context of server deployments has also been added.

CA Configuration Automation r12.5 provides deeper discovery, visualization mapping and standardized configurations with continuous compliance for both physical and virtual servers in datacenter environments and private cloud delivery projects.

CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers r12.5 delivers more robust availability, event, fault, and proactive performance management across physical, virtual and cloud environments, including enhanced VMware and cluster management support.

CA Virtual Automation r4.0, which is designed to help organizations meet their virtualization management (VM) needs, to improve the quality of your service and offer greater cost control, has added several enhancements to its self-service capabilities including the ability for end users to modify virtual machine resources after provisioning them, better control over resource pool allocations, and improved support for multiple tenant environments deployed on shared infrastructure.

CA Process Automation r3.1 enables organizations to simplify the process of designing, deploying and administering automation of manual, resource-intensive and inconsistent IT operational procedures. The new Cloud Power Pack for Workload Automation allows customers to dynamically move workloads to private or public clouds in order to meet SLA demand.

We worked closely with our customers to develop and deliver these new and enhanced solutions, and believe they offer unprecedented levels of choice, mobility and visibility - all of which customers have told us are critically important requisites when it comes to consuming and delivering cloud services.

For more information regarding these releases, including up-to-date support information, and the latest technical bulletins, please visit the respective product information pages on the CA Support Online website: https://support.ca.com/  

To learn more about CA Technologies virtualization, automation and capacity management solutions, please visit: ca.com/virtual, ca.com/automation and ca.com/capacity-management.

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By: Bill Talbot
Bill Talbot is a Product Marketing Manager for Automation solutions at CA Technologies. He has over 15 years of B-to-B marketing, sales and alliance development experience. Prior to CA Technologies, Bill founded and ran VIA Consulting, a marketing services firm that helped high tech businesses transition...
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