IT management software specialist CA Technologies announced the release of
its Automation Suite, designed to help businesses migrate to a virtualized,
dynamic cloud computing infrastructure. The suite is designed to offer a
business service-centric approach to the deployment and elastic scaling of IT
infrastructure and services by automating, orchestrating, integrating and
standardizing the provisioning and management of physical, virtual and cloud
resources.
The Automation Suite features two new products and enhancements to four other
products. All the products may be purchased and implemented separately or in
three new pre-integrated solutions designed for critical-use case requirements:
hybrid clouds, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and data centers, the
company noted. Business service automation features include Process Automation,
Configuration Automation and Workload Automation.
Process automation documents, automates and orchestrates a range of processes
across platforms, applications and IT groups. Features include a graphical
designer interface, more than 50 CA Technologies and third-party prebuilt data
connectors, and visual exception handling. Configuration automation provides
application and system discovery and dependency mapping across applications and
distributed physical and virtual servers. Features include granular
configuration tracking and auditing; more than 1,000 out-of-the-box
application, service and system templates and policies, and the ability to use
either agent or agentless approaches.
"Enterprise data center
virtualization and cloud computing strategies are being rapidly implemented
across heterogeneous physical and virtual infrastructures," said Mary
Johnston Turner, research director for enterprise system management software
for IT research firm IDC. "These new
computing architectures significantly complicate many activities, such as
application and server provisioning, and change management. Automated
provisioning solutions are needed to help IT teams address these challenges.”
Workload automation optimizes the scheduling of enterprise workloads. The
solution can be hosted and managed from both mainframe and distributed
platforms. New capabilities include enhanced agents that support more than 50
job types, dynamic management of mixed workloads for virtualized resources and
the ability to schedule workloads in public clouds such as Amazon EC2.
Additional capabilities include the ability to manage business workloads and IT
services as a single process, to monitor an entire business process, and to
analyze impact and root causes in case of a job failure.
The promise of greater agility, increased ROI and improved resource utilization
is driving rapid implementation of virtualization and cloud computing
initiatives across enterprise data centers," said Roger Pilc, general
manager of virtualization and automation for CA. "However, this results in
an additional layer of management complexity that can constrain IT's ability to
meet business needs. The 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."
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Cloud Computing 
