CA Technologies Expands and Enhances Virtualization Management Portfolio to Help Customers Increase Business Agility

Launches three new products for assurance, automation and configuration of heterogeneous virtualization environments

Enhances two products for managing physical and virtualization environments

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May 17, 2010, 06:00 ET

LAS VEGAS, May 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CA WORLD -- CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) today announced three new and two enhanced products in its virtualization management portfolio. The three new products are specifically designed to deliver robust virtualization management capabilities for virtualization-focused administrators. The company also announced substantial enhancements to two products that offer more advanced capabilities for integrating specialized virtualization management into the end-to-end management of hybrid physical and virtual systems, networks, storage and applications.

"With this innovative set of new and enhanced products, CA Technologies is raising the standard for managing virtual and private cloud environments," said Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA Technologies' Virtualization and Service Automation business unit. "Our comprehensive virtualization management portfolio helps IT overcome 'virtual stall' and increase business agility by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, and optimize complex environments."

Although virtualization has allowed organizations to reduce capital expenditure and provide basic resource efficiencies, most virtualization has occurred across low-risk servers, which represent only 15-30 percent of workloads. IT leaders have been reluctant to extend virtualization to core functions because of concerns about lack of control, visibility, and scalability, resource availability and effective allocation and use of skills.

The CA virtualization management portfolio helps customers overcome these hurdles by providing advanced lifecycle and automation capabilities. The portfolio includes three new stand-alone virtualization management products that scale from departmental and divisional initiatives to enterprise-wide deployments. These products provide easy expansion to comprehensive, business-aligned management of complex, heterogeneous physical and virtual environments -- across multiple vendors, platforms, and technologies, both on and off-premise.

"The data center of the future will be focused on the dynamic delivery of services, enabled by multi-tier applications provisioned across shared infrastructure resource pools. Most customers will gradually evolve their environments to get to this state. Today, we see customers at many different levels of virtualization and cloud management maturity," said Mary Johnston Turner, research director, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. "Sophisticated virtualization management and automation will play a central role in allowing organizations to cost effectively match workloads with resources in private cloud environments, and even offload them to off-premise public clouds if needed. CA Technologies ' new virtualization management portfolio offers customers an opportunity to invest in the capabilities they need today and ramp up the sophistication of their environment as the needs of the business evolve."

The products announced today are:

NEW: CA Virtual Assurance helps customers improve uptime and performance of virtual and private cloud environments by providing comprehensive monitoring, event correlation, and fault and performance management. Key features include model-based root-cause analytics, real-time and historical performance metrics, as well as visibility into virtual networking and application traffic response across virtual layers.

NEW: CA Virtual Automation helps customers rapidly deploy, expand, and control virtual and private cloud environments by providing automated self-service virtualization machine lifecycle management. Key features include resource pool management, template-based virtual machine provisioning, provisioning support for Amazon ECS and Amazon VPC, integrated self-service with chargeback, and capacity and utilization tracking and reporting.

NEW: CA Virtual Configuration enables customers to efficiently maintain operational consistency and compliance in dynamic virtual and private cloud environments. It automates discovery of virtual environments to inventory and baseline virtual machines, infrastructure, applications, and dependencies. It then enables customers to manage sprawl, track and compare configuration changes as well as help meet regulatory compliance and audit needs. Key features include discovery of virtual environments, including application dependencies, configuration change tracking and thousands of compliance security and best practice pre-defined rules to help track and encourage the path towards greater standardization.

"Virtualization management is a lifecycle management issue, not just a point solution for today's problem," said Chris Weitz, Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP. "It requires IT to have continuous solutions that solve uptime, performance, dynamic capacity optimization, automation, and provisioning on demand. CA offers solutions designed to help IT address these issues and to enable IT to expand virtualization beyond basic applications, including visibility and control across both virtual and physical environments."

CA Technologies also has enhanced two of its enterprise-class virtualization management products. By managing hybrid physical and virtual environments, the following products help customers achieve new levels of speed, flexibility and business competitiveness.

ENHANCED: CA Spectrum® Automation Manager helps customers deploy, expand, and control hybrid heterogeneous physical, virtual, and cloud environments by providing comprehensive provisioning, configuration, workflow, orchestration, and self-service functionality. New capabilities include Cisco UCS platform support, integration with CA Access Control for host access control and privileged user management, self-service resource reservation chargeback, advanced resource pool management, provisioning support for Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC, and further extension of CA Technologies' heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud support.

"Our internal design environment is increasingly global, with a continuous 24/7 development methodology that 'follows the sun.' This presents IT provisioning and sourcing challenges that can only be met efficiently and cost-effectively through the use of a private cloud," said Dan Salisbury, corporate vice president of Information Technology, Cadence Design Systems. "The CA Spectrum Automation Manager self-service reservation management capability provides the flexibility to deliver computing resources 'on-demand' and is thus fundamental to our engineers' ability to develop tools that maintain and extend our market leadership."

ENHANCED: CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers (formerly CA Virtual Performance Management) is an add-on product to CA Technologies' enterprise managers that enhances ROI by providing operational visibility and control for hybrid heterogeneous physical, virtual, and private cloud environments. New features include support for very large scale virtual and physical performance management, with centralized deployment and configuration, and integration into end-to-end monitoring of IT infrastructure, including virtual and physical systems, networks, databases and applications.

These new and enhanced products extend CA Technologies' existing support for virtualization that is already available in several product portfolios, including:

The CA ARCserve Family of Products, with a new release announced May 5, gives customers control over their changing business by delivering total protection, recovery and availability for systems, applications and data—across virtual and physical environments. Key features include granular recovery of Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint; bare metal restoration; data deduplication of virtual machine backups; automatic discovery of virtual machines; recovery of data across physical and virtual machines in any source/target combination; hypervisor, virtual machine and application high availability; and protection for data wherever it resides including SAN, NAS, DAS, and removable storage devices.

The CA Identity and Access Management portfolio helps alleviate the security risks virtualization introduces by controlling, monitoring, and reporting user access and activity within the virtualized environment – even for the most privileged user. This helps customers manage and audit compliance with regulatory requirements.

For more information about CA Technologies' virtualization management portfolio, visit www.ca.com/virtualization.

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About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies' innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com. Follow CA Technologies on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cainc.

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