CA Improves Integration With BrightStor 11.1

The new line consists of 13 integrated storage applications, said Jim Geronaitis, vice president of BrightStor product marketing at the Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor.

CA is also rolling out software bundles with a new pricing scheme to give customers various software buying options, he said.

It looks like CA is trying to offer more value by bundling its software, said Dave Hiechel, president and CEO of Eagle Software, a Salina, Kan.-based solution provider. "That should help [CA] with market awareness of their software," he said. "ARCserve and BrightStor are thought of as adequate, but if bundled with things like [Storage Resource Manager], they look much better."

New to the BrightStor family is BrightStor Process Automation Manager, which helps automate the storage provisioning process, said Anders Lofgren, vice president of product management at CA. It allows customers to set up templates for automatically provisioning new storage capacity. It works seamlessly with CA's SAN Manager and Storage Resource Manager applications, he said.

CA also is integrating its SAN Manager and Storage Resource Manager applications for seamless operation, Lofgren said. That will allow a full-path visualization from the application all the way to the drive spindle.

"For example, let's say I plan to replace a [SAN] switch. Now I can see what and who are affected by the change so I can schedule it when it's convenient," Lofgren said. The software vendor also is integrating its Storage Resource Manager and ARCserve Backup applications, Lofgren said. New enterprise backup features have been added to the ARCserve product family as well, he said. The features are incorporated in a new ARCserve Backup for Unix application.

In addition, CA introduced three software bundles focused on storage management, data availability and enterprisewide management. Customers can purchase the bundles for a base server price plus an additional fee for specific agents and options, or on a yearly contract based on their storage capacity at the time their contracts renew.