CA Tames The Data Center Beast

IT managers are struggling to find ways to reduce data center management costs while delivering the same -- if not more -- value to the business. Oh, and they have to comply with a bunch of regulatory and governance rules while doing it. This week CA unveiled its new CA Data Center Automation Manager software and nine enhanced enterprise IT management and governance tools for optimizing physical and virtual data centers. Here's a closer look at some of the individual products.

The new CA Data Center Automation Manager (officially r11.2, to keep in synch with other CA products) provides a comprehensive set of tools for managing both physical and virtual data center systems and resources.

The software uses a rules-based policy engine and collects system and application performance and configuration data to improve application availability, speed service delivery, optimize the value of virtualized systems and support green IT initiatives, CA said. As seen in the screen shot, (left), CA Data Center Automation Manager offers a dashboard view of system status and utilization.

The new release of CA NSM (formerly CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management) provides IT managers with a comprehensive view of events and alerts across their entire IT infrastructure, including physical, virtual and clustered systems in distributed or mainframe environments.

The new NSM r11.2 offers in-depth management and performance reporting capabilities for building a service availability solution that can correlate a million events per day. Other new features include native and dual stack support for IPv6 environments, enhanced Linux and Unix support, usability improvements and integration with CA's virtualization management and data center automation tools. CA NSM dashboards, (left), provide IT managers with vital operational information at a glance.

Nothing can bring a business to a grinding halt like a network outage. CA Network Management is an integrated system for network performance, fault, service and configuration management. The toolset includes a new release of CA eHealth Network Performance Manager (r6.1) with live reporting and monitoring features, and traffic and application usage monitoring capabilities. Also included is a new release of the Spectrum Network Fault Manager (r9) with network change and configuration management features for detecting, capturing and auditing changes in network configurations. Views provided by CA Network Management, (left), help managers spot network problems before they become major problems

The r11.2.4 release of CA Insight Database Performance Monitor provides a single view of multiple databases running on Windows, Linux and Unix platforms, monitoring their performance and alerting managers to current and potential problems.

The new release provides IPv6 support and is integrated with other CA management software such as CA NSM, CA Advanced Systems Management and the CA Wily Introscope application monitoring system. CA Insight Database Performance Monitor works with other CA systems and network management tools, (left), to provide a single view of distributed databases.

The latest version of the CA Wily Application Performance Management tools is optimized for managing Java and .Net applications within large, complex SOA and virtualized environments, according to CA. CA Wily Introscope r8 offers scalability improvements of 5x for clustered SOA environments and 2x for distributed SOA systems.

The product now supports JBoss and 64-bit platforms and has an enhanced user interface and dashboards. CA Wily Customer Experience Manager r4.2 now supports transaction monitoring in IPv6 environments and helps businesses comply with the latest Federal Information Processing Standards. CA Wily Introscope dashboards, (left), help IT managers quickly identify changes in application performance.

CA Software Change Manager gives IT managers control over globally distributed software changes. The new version, r12, offers an Eclipse-based developer workbench for managing traditional and agile development cycles, according to CA.

The toolset also supports refactoring -- making changes to software code to make it more efficient without changing its behavior -- a key element in agile development processes. And r12 tracks, analyzes and reconciles files developers are working on and synchronizes them with the change management repository. That allows developers to modify code as needed when traveling or working unconnected from a central system. The workbench screen, (left), helps development managers track development projects.