CA Technologies has updated a number of its programs to make their users more ready to run some operations in a cloud environment, the company announced Wednesday.
"The amount of choice out there [with cloud offerings] is overwhelming. We're trying to provide a way to help with that," said Jay Fry, CA vice president of marketing for cloud computing. This set of releases "will help enterprises and service providers come to conclusions about what services are right for them," he said.
CA Business Service Insight, CA Automation Suite for Data Centers and AppLogic were among the programs CA updated. The company has also introduced a number of new cloud management applications. All the programs have been released within the last 30 days.
Version 8.0 of CA Business Service Insight, a capacity planning tool, now allows users to compare service levels of public cloud offerings against the service levels of in-house implementations. Version 12.5 of the CA Automation Suite for Data Centers, a set of software for managing operations of enterprise applications, now allows administrators to shift virtualized workloads from an internal platform to public cloud services such offered by Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark.
"We're all about heterogeneity. We don't have a hardware agenda or software agenda. We support all the hypervisors or operating systems," said Ryan Shopp, CA senior director of virtualization product marketing, of these new products. "We're providing our customers with an independent approach and portability, where they can move from one cloud to another."
Version 3.0 of CA AppLogic, a program for managing distributed applications, now includes the ability to manage workloads using the VMware ESX-based virtual workloads. Former versions only supported those running on the Xen hypervisor. Users can also import workloads using in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) format.
"This is the first version to allow you to mix and match [virtual workloads on multiple hypervisors] on the same fabric," Fry said. The new version also offers additional resource detection and inventory functions. CA acquired AppLogic when it purchased 3Tera in 2010.
CA has introduced a number of new programs as well. The company modified its Automation Suite for Data Centers to handle cloud environments. The resulting package, called CA Automation Suite for Clouds 1.0, provides the ability to provision cloud resources. It draws functionality from CA Server Automation, CA Virtual Automation, CA Process Automation, CA Configuration Automation and CA Service Catalog.
Another new program, called CA Virtual Placement Manager, can help administrators balance workloads even across multiple resources. This program draws functionality developed by Hyperfomix, which CA acquired in 2010.
Other programs updated include CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, CA NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor, CA Identity Manager, CA Role and Compliance Manager, CA Data Manager and CA Automation Suite for Cisco UCS (Unified Computing Systems).