Computer Associates International has boosted its
integrated management strategy for on-demand computing with product
releases aimed at helping move customers towards the optimised use
of interchangeable and shared resources.
Chairman and chief executive officer Sanjay Kumar said one of
the biggest problems customers face is dealing with the spiking and
tailing of resource usage.
"Customers configure themselves to run at a much higher
capacity" for peak processing, security and storage requirements,
even though the business might only have one busy period during the
year where those resources are really needed, Kumar said.
Customers today want to be able to pay for what they really use,
he said.
Kumar added that CA’s approach is to enable customers to use
their existing systems by using management solutions as a way to
move toward an on-demand environment "reliably, efficiently and
safely through automation", instead of trying to achieve all of
this manually.
To address these issues, CA has unveiled a technology to
discover and manage business processes, codenamed Sonar, and four
solutions across its Unicenter, eTrust and BrightStor brands.
CA claimed Sonar can help users understand the on-demand
infrastructure and its impact on the business through an agentless
intelligence technology that can correlate business processes to
the supporting IT assets.
The technology provides root-cause analysis, assesses the
business impact of an infrastructure failure, analyses traffic on
the network for inappropriate usage, pinpoints security issues and
causes, and builds and updates maps of resources, said Yogesh
Gupta, CA’s senior vice-president and chief technology officer.
"If you do not know what kind of assets you have in your
infrastructure, it’s hard to solve problems," said CA director of
marketing Michael Jaeger said. "Sonar helps you start where the
pain is the biggest."
The four on-demand computing management solutions include:
- BrightStor Process Automation Manager, which automates the
allocation and provisioning of storage resources across multiple
platforms in response to business demands;
- eTrust Vulnerability Manager, an asset-based vulnerability
management appliance that provides monitoring capabilities and
security intelligence to automatically pinpoint
vulnerabilities;
- Unicenter NSM Option for VMware Software, which monitors
virtual machine environments on Intel-based Linux and Windows
platforms and determines when additional resources are needed;
- Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option for managing and
dynamically provisioning VMware virtual machines.
Patricia Pickett writes for ITWorldCanada.com