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January 2012 - Posts

The Increasing Importance of Managing Vblock Platforms

Published: January 31 2012, 09:07 AM | no comments
by Stephen Elliot

One of the hot button topics at Cisco Live in London with customers of VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platforms is the increasing recognition of the importance of management. Many Vblock Platform customers have neither purchased any management for the converged infrastructure nor considered how the workloads or services will be managed.

To optimize the TCO, management should be at the forefront of any converged fabric buying decision. Why? The proper planning for both the fabric itself and the workloads will enable TCO optimization over both the short and long term. 

The right management enables VCE customers to utilize automation and other key capabilities to reduce the risks associated with moving workloads onto a Vblock Platform and accelerate the deployment cycle. For example, capacity management provides the "what-if" analysis of workloads that aid in optimizing Vblock Platform resources and enables smoother workload migrations. Another example is planning a Vblock Platform-based virtual desktop service and the importance of a streamlined provisioning process. 

Click here to learn how CA Technologies five solutions for managing Vblock Platforms -- Capacity Management and Reporting Suite, Migration for SAP Applications, Private Cloud Accelerator, Process Automation, and Virtual Desktop Automation -- can help you achieve the financial, efficiency and environmental advantages of cloud computing.

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By: Stephen Elliot
Stephen Elliot is vice president of strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit. In this role, he is focused on key areas such as business unit technology, strategy creation, analyst relations, market positioning, partner development, and customer deals. Prior...
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New CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock Platforms Offers Automated Self-Service Delivery of IaaS

Published: January 30 2012, 10:31 AM | no comments
by David Resnic

Stephen Elliot, vice president of product management, CA Technologies, provides a brief overview of CA Private Cloud Accelerator for VblockTM Platforms, a new solution that drives Business Service Innovation by enabling IT to provide rapid, predictable and secure provisioning and delivery of cloud infrastructure and critical IT and business services. This is the company's fifth solution certified for use with VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, all of which are based on our Unified Automation solutions. To learn more, read today's press release.

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By: David Resnic
David is senior principal of communications at CA, working with the Virtualization and Service Automation teams. He has more than 18 years of B2B and B2C public relations experience, working with dozens of companies such as Arsenal Digital Solutions, E Ink, Hasbro, MobileAccess, and Spalding Sports Worldwide...
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The Total Economic Impact of Unified Automation

Published: January 30 2012, 09:30 AM | no comments
by Bill Talbot

I've written here several times before about the value I believe automation tools can bring to an IT organization struggling to keep up with its customers' demands for better, faster and cheaper services.  That's why I'm excited to announce the availability of a new study by Forrester Consulting that also stresses the importance of automation in transforming IT service delivery, and details the total economic impact our CA Unified Automation solutions can potentially deliver. As cited in the executive summary of the study[1]:

The tasks of the IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professional have become increasingly complex and susceptible to human error. This is a direct consequence of the sheer volume and diversity of business services and underlying IT infrastructure components. By masking IT's diversity and automating highly repetitive tasks, IT automation is the key to industrializing your operations to improve productivity and reduce costs.

CA Technologies commissioned Forrester Consulting last year to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying CA Unified Automation solutions. As part of the process, Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with executives from several CA Unified Automation customers. They then compiled the interview results into a composite case study in order to demonstrate both the quantitative and qualitative benefits that a typical enterprise and its IT organization could potentially realize by using our unified automation solutions. The study concluded that the composite organization achieved a 3-year, risk-adjusted ROI of 185% with a payback period of just 7.7 months as a result of deploying CA Unified Automation solutions!

The study also identifies in great detail several areas of quantitative benefits existing CA Unified Automation customers have realized including 1) reduced downtime; 2) IT admin and support savings; 3) improved IT staff and end user productivity; and 4) hardware savings, as well as several non-quantifiable, qualitative benefits such as 1) improved audit and reporting capability; 2) improved visibility; 3) better flexibility; and 4) additional revenue from advanced cloud implementations.

If you're considering an investment in IT automation technology in order to help address the challenge of how to "do more with less," I encourage you to download and read this study. It provides a practical, easy-to-follow framework to help you demonstrate how an investment in CA Unified Automation solutions could deliver quantifiable benefits and tangible cost savings to your organization. And if you want to take it a step further, visit our online benefit impact calculator where you can model your own organization's IT environment and automation requirements, and quickly see how much your organization could potentially save by automating routine data center management tasks using our CA Unified Automation solutions.

To learn more about CA Unified Automation solutions, read the press release issued today, visit our Web site, or stop by our booth #G18 at Cisco Live in London, January 30-February 2.

[1] "The Total Economic Impactof CA Unified Automation", a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CA Technologies, January 2012.

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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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VCE: A Hub for Automation

Published: January 19 2012, 09:46 AM | no comments
by Brandon Whichard

CA Technologies today announced that VCE certified 12 of our products to run on VblockTM Infrastructure Platforms, including these Unified Automation products:

As customers look to embrace more automation to drive Business Service Innovation and help reduce costs and increase productivity, they need a trusted platform to reliably deploy automation solutions. CA Technologies and VCE partnered to create just such a platform. With these certifications, customers can confidently move ahead with their CA Technologies Vblock ReadyTM solution deployments on Vblock Platforms, helping them get the most out of these investments.

Today's announcement is just part of the overall partnership. CA Technologies already offers a suite of solutions specifically designed to deliver IT services on Vblock Platforms. These solutions coupled with the new certifications are quickly making Vblock Platforms a new hub for automation. We expect this hub will continue to grow as our partnership continues to expand.

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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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Automation: Nice-to-Have or Must-Have?

Published: January 11 2012, 03:02 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Bill Talbot

In this new age of virtualization and cloud computing, I'd argue for the latter. IT is caught in a conundrum - budgets are flat or declining but the demand for IT's services have never been higher. So how can IT deliver services better, faster and cheaper using manual, cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone processes? Short answer - it can't.

I'm glad to see that our friends at Ovum agree. They just released a new Technology Audit report profiling our CA Automation Suite for Data Centers solution, and I think the following excerpt sums up their feelings toward automation in this age of the "new normal":

When the prospect of cloud computing is introduced, the role of automation and the changes needed to the process models become more than "nice-to-haves;" they become a central tenet of IT delivery.

The following passage also really hits home since it explains how difficult it can be to take advantage of new computing paradigms such as virtualization and cloud computing without automation:

Lack of automation is already preventing organizations from benefiting from newer technologies. For example, lack of dynamic management to enforce business needs in a virtualized environment results in greater labor costs, which can obliterate the hardware cost savings that the technology makes possible. Increasingly, organizations looking at adoption of a cloud approach recognize that adding cloud-based resources to the management of their existing environment would fail to yield benefits if managing manually, and reactively, were the only option. Indeed, costs may well increase.

CA Automation Suite for Data Centers is one of our several rich and robust suites of integrated automation solutions that can help you deliver value with Business Service Innovation.  

But don't take my word for it. Here's Ovum's take on CA Automation Suite for Data Centers:

Mid-sized and large organizations looking to transform their existing data centers, at their own pace, into a more cloud-ready environment, should strongly consider this offering from CA Technologies, especially as it provides so well for managing the use of physical, cloud-based, and virtualized resources.

To read the full Ovum Technology Audit report, click here. 

If you are interested in learning more about how automation can help you transform IT service delivery, automate complex processes, and reduce costs, contact us to get the journey started.

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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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