CA Looks To Ease Virtualisation Admin Burden

Computer Associates (CA) has beefed up its virtualisation management portfolio in an effort to reduce the complexity associated with these environments.

The new offerings touch on everything from management and compliance, through to automation and energy efficiency, as well security and implementation.

“There’s a tremendous amount of focus around how do you manage a virtualised architecture and how do you take along the physical [systems],” Stephen Elliot, vice president of strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit.

Adding to the discussion is the growing interest in the cloud computing model, of which virtualisation is a foundation technology, Elliot said. For many enterprises, that means private clouds that can be deployed within their own environments.

“Virtualisation will grow, but you won’t virtualise everything,” he said. “A lot of people are asking, ‘How do I deploy a private cloud?’”

Analysts are continuing to predict a healthy future for virtualisation in the data centre. Forrester Research said earlier this year that 31 percent of operating systems currently are virtualised, and that number will jump to 59 percent in 2011. In addition, Gartner analysts at their Symposium/ITxpo event last week said that while currently, only 16 percent of IT workloads currently are running on virtual machines, that will grow to 50 percent by the end of 2012.

All that’s being driven by the need for greater energy efficiency and flexibility, and the desire to drive down capital and operating expenses. It also is increasing the management headaches as virtualised environments grow in size and complexity.

CA’s management software is designed to ease those headaches, Elliot said.

Among CA’s new offerings is Spectrum Service Assurance, which is designed to give IT administrators greater visibility into their virtualised environments, and how their virtualised and physical environments impact the services those systems support.

In addition, CA is expanding the capabilities of its eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 to cover virtualised environments from VMware and other vendors, Elliot said. It also includes enhanced environmental and energy monitoring.

In that same vein, CA’s new ecoMeter and ecoGovernance tools gives IT administrators the ability to track the energy savings derived from server virtualisation.