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March 2010 - Posts

What Are CA Catalyst and the Unified Service Model?

Published: March 22 2010, 10:53 AM | 11 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

My previous blog post referred to CA Catalyst and the Unified Service Model (USM). Catalyst is the integration and application platform that implements the USM. Catalyst is not just a tool for integrating CA products -- CA's products come integrated. Catalyst, USM and the tools enable extension, configuration, tailoring, etc.  for specific customer IT environments. We will be demonstrating the integration at CA World 2010 in May, 2010 in Las Vegas. 

Figure 1 -- Catalyst and Integration

Catalyst's primary and initial goal is integrating CA's products, and integrating CA products with third-party systems. Current approaches to integrating IT management systems rely on point-to-point connections using product specific formats and protocols. Catalyst applies enterprise application integration patterns to the problem of integrating IT management systems. Specifically, Catalyst is a logical integration hub between connected systems (Figure 1 -- Catalyst and Integration) implementing web services standards based integrations. The key benefits of this approach are:

  • Moving from NxN protocols, formats and technologies for connecting N systems to a single, standards based protocol and format. This reduction vastly reduces complexity and fragility.
  • Catalyst's support for industry standards like web services and WS-Management allow the use of 3rd party, commonly used tools for integrating and extending systems.
  • The logical hub provides a single point for monitoring the progress and activity of IT management processes, for example all of the product interactions to reconfigure a server cluster based on a failure alert.

Catalyst is not just low-level integration at the web services, formats and protocol level. IT management systems have different representations of common core concepts like "application server" or "router." The systems have the same information and manage the same resource types and instances, but have arbitrarily different representations. For example, differences might be

  • Names for resource types and properties, e.g. "Router" versus "Network Switch," "IPAddr" versus "Internet Address," etc.
  • Different representations for common data, e.g. representing a DNS name in a string like http://www.ca.com/ as a string versus a name-value-pair set like (("node", "www"), ("org", "ca"), ("domain", ".com)).

Catalyst's implementation of a Unified Service Model defines a logically coherent, common representation of common resource types and management operations.  USM also correlates and integrates the data instances into a single, logical management data repository and management system. In essence, Catalyst/USM is a logical system of record (SOR) for managing IT systems and resources.

 

Figure 2 -- Unified Service Model

Unified Service Model provides a simple overview of USM's approach to integration, reconciliation and correlation. Logically, Catalyst/USM is a federated database, conceptually a federated CMDB. The existing IT management systems retain their information and capabilities. Catalyst/USM implements rules and policies for

  • Mapping from existing data representations to/from the coherent USM representation.
  • Correlating information to determine when more than one IT management system has information about a single IT resource. Correlation is logically similar to performing relational database joins using indices. USM's approach is not as rigid as SQL and relies on an extensible set of simple rules. For example, there could be rules that determine if "Donald F. Ferguson" and "Ferguson, D.F." are the same.
  • Reconciling information when IT management systems have different, conflicting values for shared information.

Catalyst/USM's support for reconciliation and correlation rules, including rule/policy extensibility and configuration, is similar to master data management. Unlike federating CMDBs, federated database in general or master data management in general, Catalyst/USM

  • Uses event based integration to update information in the external IT management systems based on the rules and policies. IT administrators looking at different IT management systems see coherent information, and do not need to manually reconcile different data to perform their jobs.
  • Supports management actions and operations, in essence becoming a single point of management (SPOM) to drive the external management systems.

Finally, CA delivers a definition and implementation of USM and prebuilt integration of CA and 3rd party products. Subsequent blog entries will explain Catalyst's relationship to CA's products, support for customers' existing SOA and web service environments, application of common sense and simple approaches instead of building an overwhelming technology, etc. The number one rule of the CA architecture team is "Use common sense."

I am also preparing a technical whitepaper that explains Catalyst, USM, and CA's product integration. The paper also explains how the technology forms a foundation for CA's technical strategy. I will make the paper available in a subsequent post.

 

 

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By: Don Ferguson
Dr. Donald F. Ferguson is executive vice president and chief technology officer at CA, responsible for delivering common technology services to CA’s business units, ensuring architectural compliance and integration of the company's solutions and products. Tasked with promoting technical excellence...
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3Tera and CA’s Technical Strategy

Published: March 01 2010, 04:42 PM | 3 Comment(s)
by Don Ferguson

I am very excited about CA's announcement to acquire 3Tera and believe it represents a turning point in our cloud  strategy to help customers with cloud computing. I have known the CEO, Barry Lynn, for 15 years and the extraordinarily talented 3tera technical team for several years.   The technology and people are going to be a large part of both our  product strategy and our broader architecture and technical strategy. An obvious question is "How will 3tera fit into CA's products and strategy?"  I thought I'd provide a bit of background about CA's architecture and technical strategy before answering this question about 3Tera specifically.

One of the core capabilities of CA's products is managing composite applications and the IT resources that realize the applications. Composite applications are the IT implementation of business services. Examples of composite applications realizing business services are online banking, human resources self-service and enterprise resource planning. Until 3Tera, however, we did not have tools for modeling and defining the IT resources and relationships supporting a new composite application.

Many CA products already support composite application management, for example Spectrum Service Assurance and CA Wily Introscope(see Figure 1 -- Composite Applications).

Figure 1 -- Composite Applications

Composite applications/business services are the central concept in CA Catalyst's Unified Service Model (USM), which is an evolution of CA's previous work in this space. (My next blog entry will discuss CA Catalyst and USM).

A subset of the core concepts in USM is:

  • A type mode defining the schema for physical, software and logical entities like router, project or application server.
  • An instance model that contains information about the actual instances of a type in the IT environment, e.g. "WebSphere Commerce Server 21" or "Computer Server http://www.ca.com.web1/."
  • A relationship model documenting connections and dependencies between types and instances. A simple example is "installed on."
  • A transaction model representing end-to-end units-of-work (UOWs) flowing through composite applications. An example is a "Submit Shopping Cart Transaction" web transaction.

Figure 2 – IBM SOA Governance Model: Model, Assemble, Deploy, Manage

Managing composite applications is central to CA's technical strategy. Customers want to manage the composite application as a whole, not perform tedious manual tasks on the individual resources in the application.  For example, a customer may want to authorize access to the purchase order processing composite application, and not manually configure access in the application server, database server, etc. Moreover, almost all cloud applications will be composite applications spanning on-premise resources and cloud provided resources. This approach is fundamental to Microsoft Azure Appfabric. I also wrote a paper on the concept of an Internet Service Bus that explains the concept.

A concept inherent to composite applications is Model-Assemble-Deploy-Manage (MADM). Figure 2 provides an overview of the MADM model I helped define for service-oriented architectures (SOA) when I was at IBM. 

Figure 3 - AppLogic's Infrastructure Designer provides a screenshot of 3Tera's user interface to defining IT composites. In addition to the visual editor, 3Tera provides support for defining reusable templates that vastly simplify sharing IT resource and application definitions. The UI tool has interfaces for loading discovered internal and cloud services into the design repository. These capabilities significantly improve the ease-of-use and flexibility of interacting with CA's products and transforming IT environments. The capabilities improve IT's agility and flexibility.

Figure 3 – AppLogic’s Infrastructure Designer

One of the strategic technical initiatives underlying our technical strategy is model and policy driven IT management. Our goal is to reduce the cost and complexity and improve the agility of managing IT by 10x by
  • Model and policy driven IT management
  • Enabled by role, task and skill specific tools
  • Integrating CA and non-CA management products' capabilities through Catalyst and the Unified Service Model.

Figure 4 -- Model Driven IT Management provides an overview of the vision. The value of the approach to our customers is enormous. The concept is to make IT users and administrators more productive by giving them intuitive, task specific tools around common, consistent IT information. This approach is at the heart of Web 2.0 enabling our products, integrating our products with other enterprise UI environments and integrating innovative UIs from acquisitions and internal product development.

Providing tools that integrate with and fit into the model and assemble phases of MADM is essential.  CA needs to support customers' investment in the business modeling and application development phases of MADM. The model and assemble phase define

  • Application structure, end-to-end business processes, etc.
  • Business level key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Business goals and objectives
  • Business events and their meaning for business activity monitoring/management (BAM).

Integrating into the MADM lifecycle enables management products to have deeper insight into the business dimension of applications, which ultimately drive IT management. USM, our discovery and monitoring products and AppLogic's infrastructure editor will enable CA to complement and build on customers' model and assemble phase without going beyond our core competencies. The integration will significantly improve the alignment between IT management, business modeling and application development.

Finally, 3Tera has other benefits that I will cover in another blog entry, specifically

  • An "application store" concept for accessing and requesting provisioning of applications. CA's automation and virtualization products now be able to say "There's an app for that."
  • Managed service providers (MSPs) find the app store concept very appealing and 3Tera's ability to visually define new apps and hand-off to provisioning on a virtual infrastructure amazingly valuable. Enterprises increasing rely on MSPs and 3Tera has demonstrated value to MSPs including several MSP relationships.

Figure 4 -- Model Driven IT Management

CA will publish detailed positioning, integration scenarios and other collateral once we complete the acquisition in several weeks.  I'll address these and related issues in a future blog post.

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By: Don Ferguson
Dr. Donald F. Ferguson is executive vice president and chief technology officer at CA, responsible for delivering common technology services to CA’s business units, ensuring architectural compliance and integration of the company's solutions and products. Tasked with promoting technical excellence...
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