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November 2011 - Posts

Unified Automation: Helping IT Rapidly Deliver Services that Accelerate Business Outcomes

Published: November 15 2011, 05:44 PM | no comments
by Brandon Whichard

CA World 2011 is definitely living up to expectations here in Vegas.  I have really enjoyed this year's opening acts.  Sunday night's keynote by Bill McCracken with special guest stars, Michael Capellas (CEO of VCE) and Vivek Kundra (former CIO of the USA), kicked things off in a big way.  It was great to hear first hand what some of the expectations were when the United States Federal Government adopted its "Cloud First" policy and how that drove and is continuing to drive great savings and change across, not just the US federal government, but across the entire IT industry.

Then, yesterday there was a great session by Roger Pilc the GM of CA's Virtualization and Automation group.  He was joined on stage by three IT industry rock stars: Jack Story the CTO of Wipro/InfoCrossing, Chris Satchell, the CTO and an EVP at IGT (International Gaming Technologies), and Martin Capurro of CenturyLink. 

Roger played his hand by talking about CA's automation portfolio in a way that struck a nice balance between addressing the overall business value of the products that make up Unified Automation and the unique value of each product in the portfolio - something a product guy like me really appreciates.  While it is a popular topic with industry analysts, before this session I had not heard CA talk about just how well the company provides a truly Unified Automation solution.   

For those who weren't able to make the session, let me give you a quick summary.  Roger discussed the three major areas of Unified Automation: infrastructure automation, application automation and service automation.  He pointed out a couple of times how the whole design is to help IT organizations rapidly deliver services that accelerate business outcomes, reduce costs and drive innovation. 

One of the things made very clear by the end of the presentation is that CA is not bluffing when it comes to its Unified Automation story.  It is much more than just a vision.  It is being implemented around the world and it is changing the industries of those companies who prize agility and first mover advantage. Roger shared several stories about customers who had already implemented aspects of the Unified Automation portfolio.  The point was made in spades by each of the three customers who stood up and talked about what they were doing and why.

I'll leave you with the top 10 points that stood out for me and I think improve the odds that CA is going to be the leading partner when it comes to operationalizing cloud environments.

1) CA Process Automation is one of CA's most strategic products. Not only is CA seen as a market leader with this solution, the company is doubling down on it by investing to build a much stronger community and market ecosystem. To that end, CA recently made various pre-engineered integration connectors for CA Process Automation available through the Cloud Commons marketplace [link].

2) There are a variety of forces, including economic pressure, the explosive growth of virtualization and exponential increases in complexity, which are changing the IT landscape in irreversible ways, and driving the need for a comprehensive yet modular approach to automation.

3) Most IT organizations are managing and maintaining large, legacy bases of applications across diverse infrastructure, either manually or by using disparate, isolated automation tools designed for specific technology silos.

4) CA changes the game with unified automation because it changes the supply chain of IT to a "pull" versus "push" approach to demand, much like Lean IT and Kanban principles radically changed manufacturing.

5) Logicalis can, using CA's Unified Automation solutions, migrate a customer's SAP application from the customer's data center to Logicalis' data center in less time than it takes most people to drink a cup of hot chocolate - 7 minutes.

6) CA enables a flexible, open, modular foundation that eases implementation. In short, it gives you options, and options are always valuable.

7) CA simplifies operations by using automation to abstract away the complexity of diverse, heterogeneous platforms, methodologies and toolsets.

8) CA provides keen insight into current and future capital and operational costs with predictive analytics so you can strategically plan investments.

9) Because of the strong automated provisioning capabilities, CA has stood up (into production) an entire private cloud in 7 days, with 4 of those days being spent on just getting the right credentials.

10) Companies that are operationalizing the cloud are 120% more likely to expand their revenue channels by using a service catalog and 70% more likely to accelerate the delivery of cloud services by using an IT Process Automation tool. There were a half a dozen other industry analyst statistics about the advantages of using service catalogs and ITPA when operationalizing the cloud...but that is fodder for a post for another day. Since these benefits are happening again and again, they are anything but dumb luck.

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By: Brandon Whichard
Brandon Whichard is part of the product marketing team working in CA's Virtualization and Service Automation Business Unit. He is responsible for promoting and evangelizing CA’s Data Center Automation solutions. Prior to joining CA Technologies, Brandon held a variety of product management and marketing...
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Ready…Set…Cloud!

Published: November 14 2011, 12:00 PM | no comments
by Bill Talbot

In case you've been living under a rock for the past 18 months or so, this "cloud computing" thing is kind of a big deal.  In fact according to Gartner's 2011 CIO Survey, cloud computing is now the #1 CIO technology priority - in 2009, it only ranked #16. This is no "flash-in-the-pan", "here today, gone tomorrow" trend. It's a seismic shift that's changing the face of IT and how CIOs fundamentally deliver services to the organizations and stakeholders they serve.

At CA Technologies, we've been following this trend closely and have marshaled our considerable resources to ensure we're delivering solutions that help our customers accelerate, simplify and smooth the transition to cloud computing. To that end, we're proud to announce the following enhancements to several of our market-leading automation and analytics solutions that can help you move from "talking cloud" to actually delivering and optimizing the cloud services that your users are clamoring for.

CA Automation Suite for Clouds 1.5

CA Automation Suite for Clouds, first announced in July, delivers an enterprise private cloud solution to transform existing data centers by rapidly rolling out private cloud services and realize faster time-to-value for a cloud deployment. It offers pre-designed workflows for automated, self-service delivery of virtual and physical infrastructure and application services, while supporting fixed or usage-based pricing with a billing and financial reporting engine that automatically associates service usage to departments, cost centers, or customers/users. This new release of the solution adds:

  • Support for platforms such as the CA AppLogic® turn-key cloud computing platform, VCE vBlockTM Infrastructure Platforms, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM LPAR, Oracle Solaris Zones and VMware View;
  • New pre-integrated Power Packs (pre-packaged cloud services content and workflows) for CA AppLogic, VCE IaaS, VDI, CA Workload Automation, IT Service Management (ITSM) and Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs);
  • Enhanced cloud management, security and orchestration capabilities to further unify cloud automation and simplify the management of multiple clouds in a single interface; and
  • Major enhancements and improvements to the integrated CA Service Catalog graphical user interface (GUI).

Figure 1: Quickly and easily deliver cloud services via the new and improved GUI for CA Automation Suite for Clouds

 

CA AppLogic 3.1

As mentioned, CA Automation Suite for Clouds is an ideal solution for customers seeking to transform their existing IT and data center infrastructure in order to better deliver and manage cloud services. For customers willing to take a more greenfield approach to delivering cloud services, CA AppLogic is a turn-key, cloud platform that 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. New features of CA AppLogic 3.1 include:

  • Expanded platform support including Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and VMware ESX 4.1;
  • Expanded hardware compatibility including support for 10Gb Intel Network Interface Cards (NICs);
  • Improved Role-Based Access Controls; and
  • Better meta data backup capabilities.

CA Capacity Management

Updates to our market-leading capacity management portfolio include Virtual Placement Manager 1.0.1 and Capacity Manager 5.1.2, which continue to drive CA Technologies leadership in predictive analytics, state of the art infrastructure modeling and large scale compute efficiency analysis. Specific capabilities that will help optimize your cloud services delivery include:

  • New cost-driven workload placement and balancing options;
  • New data center usage and optimization analysis and reporting;
  • Support for converged computing platforms including VCE vBlock, Cisco UCS, NetApp FlexPod and HP Matrix;
  • Integration and support for CA Application Performance Management as a supported data source for modeling change to application environments; and
  • Expanded hypervisor platform support including VMware ESXi 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V r2.

CA Server Automation 12.6

CA Server Automation helps speed your migration to the cloud by converging the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual systems. This new version includes several cloud-enabling features including:

  • Integration with CA AppLogic to more quickly and easily provision or migrate existing applications and IT resources to the cloud computing platform;
  • New ability to create, configure and deploy VMware VLANs as part of the VM provisioning and cloud lifecycle management process;
  • Enhanced support for third party cloud computing platforms including VMware vSphere 5, IBM-AIX Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM), and NetApp FlexPod, as well as;
  • Japanese localization and support.

Hopefully you're in the shiny city of "Lost Wages" this week attending CA World. If so, take a break from the craps and blackjack tables to learn how our automation and analytics solutions can help speed and smooth your journey to the cloud.

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 cloud, automation and capacity management solutions, please visit: ca.com/cloud, ca.com/automation and ca.com/capacity-management or follow us on Twitter @CAvirtualAuto and @CA_Cloud.

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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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Proactive Capacity Management Will Be a Hot Topic at CA World

Published: November 09 2011, 03:37 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by John Ashby

I can't believe that CA World is only days away. Hopefully everyone has taken notice that this year's event will feature a number of sessions/labs/demos dedicated exclusively to Capacity Management. 

Proactive Capacity Management is listed as one of the key areas of focus with most customers and our Hyperformix acquisition places CA Technologies in a unique position to help organizations, especially those with large, diverse infrastructures spanning both physical and virtual platforms. 

This year at CA World we not only have the legacy Hyperformix product suite as part of our portfolio, we also will showcase a number of new additions and enhancements, including support for converged compute (e.g. FlexPod and vBlock) infrastructure, new costing capabilities and the highly anticipated integration with CA Application Performance Management.     

To learn more, I suggest attending the following sessions. You can find more by using our Agenda Builder.

The Migration Dilemma - Migrating from P2V and V2V

Abstract: Whether you are planning to move your workloads from physical to virtual platforms, or considering alternative hypervisor choices or converged infrastructures like the VCE Vblock, designing and configuring VM's and clusters and determining where workloads are best placed is time consuming and inaccurate. Join us for an informative look at CA's Capacity Management solution and how it can be used to make informed decisions on configuring clusters, balancing VM's and hosts, optimizing utilization and placing workloads. We will also illustrate the power of what-if scenarios to predict the impact of changing workload volumes, platforms, hardware, OS, hypervisors and other important variables that impact performance.

Applying Intelligence to Continually Optimize your Virtual Investment

Abstract: Virtualizing IT infrastructures can be costly when resources are not optimally utilized. Virtual infrastructures by nature are constantly changing, therefore it is imperative you apply automation to constantly evaluate the efficient use of your virtual resources. Join us as we illustrate how CA's Capacity Management solution can help you balance your virtual infrastructure to ensure optimal performance of business services while driving down costs. 

Hands-on Lab: CA Virtual Placement Manager - Ensuring the Optimization of your Virtual Investment

Abstract: Join us for a hands-on demonstration of the powerful capabilities of CA Virtual Placement Manager. We will illustrate how CA Virtual Placement Manager can be used to provide placement recommendations for workloads while balancing virtual resources to ensure optimal performance of business services while driving down costs.

Planning for Capacity, Planning for Performance

Abstract: Have you ever wondered if you will be able to meet the needs of the business based upon business growth projections?  Having insight to make informed decisions as business demand, infrastructure, and platform changes are all taking place simultaneously is vital to ensure the availability of critical business services. Join us as we demonstrate methods in which you can gain the insight required to plan for capacity and performance.

I look forward to an exciting three days and hope to see you in Vegas!!

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By: John Ashby
John Ashby is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies, focused on enterprise capacity planning and virtualization automation solutions. John has over 13 years of experience in IT with a heavy emphasis in the enterprise compute, storage and virtualization space. He holds numerous certifications...
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CA Technologies & NetApp: Optimizing the Business Value of Shared Infrastructure

Published: November 07 2011, 03:15 PM | no comments
by Bill Talbot

The promise of cloud computing is the ability to pool and share your IT resources so you can increase efficiency, flexibility and agility. However, as is often the case, the "promise" often exceeds "reality." The majority of IT shops are still organized and staffed based on often disconnected IT silos. But what good does it do to pool your servers, your VMs, your network assets, and your storage-separately? Why should you have to use multiple management consoles, comply with multiple policies, and engage multiple teams to provision a single cloud service?

Integrating Storage into Service Delivery

To address this challenge and to support our joint customers' need for rapid service delivery across a shared infrastructure, CA Technologies and NetApp are working together to provide the IT systems management capabilities you need to optimize your shared infrastructure. We have partnered to provide integrated service and operations management solutions that allow you to both monitor the health and performance of business critical services, from the application to the spindle, as well as automate the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources, end-to-end, including storage.

The end result is better:

  • Visibility - Understand how storage contributes to and supports overall service delivery, and provide insight into both business and technology constraints and opportunities
  • Control - Manage storage according to service impact and priority and drive faster resolution of storage problems in a business context; and
  • Automation - Support flexible storage provisioning options by leveraging policies for dynamic, "on demand" and elastic resource management

Supporting the Dynamic Data Center of the Future

Not only are CA Technologies and NetApp working together to better manage the disparate silos that characterize most heterogeneous IT environments today, we also are partnering to deliver optimized solutions for the next generation data center. Data centers of the future are being built on converged infrastructure, such as NetApp FlexPodTM, which integrates disparate compute, storage and network components into a single architecture that scales to fit physical, virtual and cloud customer environments. We are working closely with NetApp and its FlexPod partners to help customers more quickly on-board applications and resources to the FlexPod environment, and to better manage them once there, using our Service Automation solutions.

See for Yourself

Together, CA Technologies and NetApp deliver the end-to-end service visibility, control and automation you need to become more agile in meeting your business' demands for better and faster service delivery.

If you are interested in learning how to better provision, manage and automate end-to-end services, including storage, or how to better manage and optimize your FlexPod environment, please attend the following sessions at next week's CA World:

For additional information about the CA Technologies and NetApp alliance and our integrated solutions, please visit www.ca.com/netapp or follow us on Twitter @CAvirtualAuto.

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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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Transforming Your IT Infrastructure to Deliver Cloud Services

Published: November 02 2011, 12:57 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Subo Guha

CA World 2011 is around the corner and the buzz for cloud, automation and virtualization is more feverish than ever. Accelerating time-to-market and service delivery are driving forces behind the rising popularity and rapid adoption of cloud computing. However, transforming your existing IT infrastructure to deliver cloud services can be a daunting process.

I encourage you to attend our session on this topic to learn about CA Automation Suite for Clouds, a recently announced solution that provides dramatic time-to-value in building a private cloud and flexibility to deliver new cloud services. We have been seeing great success and demand for this solution from customers embarking on the cloud journey but need to have a means to know where to start and how they expand their cloud needs from their existing infrastructures.

I have been travelling around the globe the last several months and I am amazed at the level of customer interest to transform their current IT services delivery towards an Infrastructure as a Service model that can deliver any service very rapidly. Having an open and flexible cloud solution that can be developed quickly from existing infrastructure and have the capability to orchestrate across many choices and needs of automation and cloud services internally or externally from public clouds is a common theme I keep hearing from customers.

Join us as we talk about this new solution and how it can help drive a breakthrough way to deliver new cloud services and also our vision of how we can help customers deliver a unified cloud solution in their environment to prevent islands of cloud and the associated management nightmare. I will be hosting this session along with Sean McDermott, CEO of Windward IT, a partner of CA Technologies who helped develop CA Automation Suite for Clouds 1.0. Sean will provide some great insight into Windward's dealings with several customers for cloud computing and how CA Automation Suite for Clouds can really break the barrier to get started and expand towards the "automated IT services" from the cloud vision.

While you will have ample opportunity to see CA Automation Suite for Clouds in our booths as well as hear about it in the keynote 10x Marks the Spot: Better Business Outcomes Delivered Today, I encourage you to visit the agenda builder and add Automation Suite for Clouds to your agenda.

If you haven't already, register now for CA World. I hope to see you there!

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By: Subo Guha
Over the past 20 years Subo Guha has served in various executive roles in the areas of virtualization, systems management and server technologies at CA Technologies, Dell, Egenera and NCR. Currently Subo serves CA Technologies as vice president of Product Management for the Virtualization and Automation...
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