This year's CA World, held in Las Vegas, might have been called CA Cloud with all the focus the company placed on it. The keynote, by Chris O'Malley, executive vice president of the Cloud Products and Solutions business line, focused on the business issues around the cloud. His keynote also included announcements of four products that comprise the CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite. In addition, the company announced a number of other new and enhanced management products--most of which were associated with the cloud--as well as an industry-standard method for calculating service measures and an online collaborative community called Cloud Commons for discussing cloud issues.
"The Cloud Connected Management Suite appears to be a well-considered and well-aligned strategy for using existing elements within CA's sizeable management technologies inventory (augmented with some new capabilities, of course) to meet the specific needs of deploying, discovering, optimizing and monitoring cloud services," says Jim Frey, research director for Enterprise Management Associates Inc., a Portsmouth, N.H., consultancy. "Most important here, from my perspective, is CA's commitment to connect these solutions with its existing broader portfolio of solutions, so that cloud services management can become an integral subset of broader IT management architectures and practices." He is also interested in Cloud Commons and SMI and will be watching to see how well it is embraced by the industry.
The Management Suite consists of four products:
- CA Cloud Insight, which lets users compare measures of service performance such as quality, agility, risk, cost, capability and security.
- CA Cloud Compost, which lets users create composite IT environments from commodity hardware, deploy composite services into the cloud and manage those services.
- CA Cloud Optimize, which lets users analyze performance measures and choose options for improve them.
- CA Cloud Orchestrate, which manages the deployment of suggestions from CA Cloud Optimize. Some products were based on technologies acquired with Oblicore and 3Tera.
Additionally, virtualization products include: CA Virtual Assurance, which monitors the performance of virtual and private cloud environments; CA Virtual Automotion, which lets users deploy and control virtual and private cloud environments; and CA Virtual Configuration, which lets users track and compare configuration changes and help meet regulatory compliance and audit needs. The company also enhanced its CA Spectrum Automation Manager software, integrating it with CA Access Control, as well as CA Virtual Performance Management, now known as CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, providing support for very large scale virtual and physical performance management.
The first components of the Cloud-Connected Management Suite are scheduled to be available by the end of the year, when pricing will be announced. The CA Virtual family of products is priced per processor, starting at $17,000. These products are scheduled to be available starting in June. CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers is priced per processor, starting at $75,000. CA Spectrum Automation Manager is priced per processor, starting at $150,000. These two products are scheduled to be available by the end of the year.
