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 vBlock^TM 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.