CA Boosts Profile Of Cloud Automation Suite
The new product line includes updated products and some new tools for automating and standardising virtualisation and cloud management
CA Technologies revamped and re-launched its CA Automation Suite for virtualised dynamic cloud computing environments, CA said on 18 October.
The new CA Automation Suite features two new products and enhancements to four other products, including The CA Server Automation, CA Virtual Automation, CA Client Automation, and CA Workload Automation.
Realignment
CA realigned the automation suite with its overall cloud portfolio of products that automate, integrate and standardise the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud resources, CA said. The revamp would make the product line more visible to customers, said Ryan Shopp, senior director of product marketing of the Virtualisation and Automation group at CA Technologies.
“I was in the industry and I didn’t even know CA had an automation suite,” said Shopp, who joined CA earlier this year.
The refreshed automation suite is more business service-centric, so that IT managers can look at the application and know what it does and who it’s for, according to Shopp. For example, an IT administrator would be able to guess CA Client Automation’s functionality based on the name, as opposed to the previous generally-named CA IT Client Manager, he said.
The applications can be purchased and implemented as separate modules, giving customers the flexibility to pick and choose what features they need. When additional modules are “plugged in” at a later date, the applications automatically detect and share data, making it very scalable, said Shopp.
Reducing expenses
CA Process Automation and CA Configuration Automation are new stand-alone products.
CA Process Automation documents, automates, and orchestrates a range of processes across platforms, applications, and IT groups, CA said. IT managers can use the tool to reduce operational expenses, increase staff productivity and increase speed in delivering IT services, according to Shopp.
CA Configuration Automation identifies and standardises device configurations and tracks cross-device dependencies, CA said. IT managers can perform application and system discovery and create dependency maps across a range of applications and distributed physical and virtual servers, said Shopp.
The enhancements to existing products include new hypervisor support and management tools for public, private, and hybrid clouds.
CA Client Automation integrates and automates a wide range of client device management tasks such as bare metal buildups and rebuilds, patch management, Windows 7 migration and remote desktop support, CA said. The enhancements include application virtualisation management and VMware VDI linked clone management.
Automation
CA Server Automation dynamically provisions, patches, and deploys applications and services across physical and virtual systems based on standard templates and performance metrics. Enhancements include support for new hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon VPC.
CA Virtual Automation provides self-service and automated virtual server provisioning for public, private, and hybrid clouds. It can directly provision applications on Amazon EC2. Enhancements include support for new hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V and for Cisco Unified Computing System.
CA Workload Automation automates and optimises the scheduling, monitoring, and dynamic balancing of enterprise workloads. The enhancements include dynamic management of mixed workloads for virtualised resources, the ability to schedule workloads in public clouds such as Amazon EC2, and the ability to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot business workloads.
These stand-alone modules are also available in three pre-integrated packages aligned with specific business services: hybrid clouds, Cisco UCS, and data centres.
Hybrid clouds
The CA Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds, to build private clouds that leverage the public cloud for storage, consists of CA Process Automation, CA Server Automation, CA Virtual Automation, and CA Service Catalog and Accounting.
CA Automation Suite for Cisco UCS, to deploy and manage Cisco UCS environments, consists of CA Configuration Automation, CA Process Automation, CA Server Automation, and CA Virtual Automation.
CA Automation Suite for Data Centres consists of CA Configuration Automation, CA Process Automation, CA Server Automation, and CA Virtual Automation. Previously available as CA Spectrum Automation Manager, this package manages integrated physical and virtual infrastructure.
“The CA Automation Suite is designed to absorb this complexity, helping IT to increase agility, reduce risk and cost, and improve service delivery while aligning with the business in unprecedented, transformational ways,” said Roger Pilc, general manager of the Virtualisation and Automation group.
