Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) announce general availability of BrightStor r11.5, the second release of the company’s bundle of integrated intelligent storage management applications, this month. The new version of the bundle provides support for additional devices and applications along with streamlining disk and tape backups, according to a company executive.
“We’ve really enhanced and extended the entire suite,” Stephen Widen, director of BrightStor product marketing at CA, said in an interview. “We’re continuing to expand the breadth and depth of the BrightStor brand.”
In September of last year, CA debuted its BrightStor r11.1 bundle, the first time the company had tightly integrated the various members of its BrightStor storage management product family. The move was designed to help CA compete more effectively against the likes of EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp., the latter now part of Symantec Corp. The products continue to be available individually or together as pieces of the BrightStor bundle.
The BrightStor r11.1 bundle was also part of a new CA strategy to highlight intelligent storage management, according to Widen. CA defines intelligent storage management as a four-step process of identifying storage assets, classifying the information stored in terms of its importance and value to the corporation, defining and structuring the information in terms of its value, and finally automating the defined policies and procedures governing the storage of that data.
BrightStor r11.5 provides additional support for midrange disk arrays from companies like EMC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. to help customers looking to adopt tiered storage, the assignment of different types of data to different storage media or hardware. The software bundle also adds in support for 64-bit platforms.
Another new feature contained in BrightStor r11.5 is a simplification of the setup and management of both disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. “It had taken multiple steps to do [backups in BrightStor r11.1],” Widen said. “We’ve streamlined the process.”
With the previous version, BrightStor r11.1, CA offered support for operating systems and databases, Widen said. BrightStor r11.5 will feature the software’s first true support for enterprise applications, with the support of SAP AG applications.
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