CA streamlines cloud and hybrid IT infrastructure adoption through better holistic services monitoring

New capabilities in CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) are designed to help enterprises adopt cloud more rapidly and better mange hybrid IT infrastructure heterogeneity across several major cloud environments.

Enterprises and SMBs are now clamoring for hybrid cloud benefits, due to an ability for focus on apps and gain speed to new business initiatives, says Stephen Orban, Global Head of Enterprise Strategy at AWS.

"Going cloud-first allows organizations to focus on the apps that make the business run," says Orban. "Using hybrid computing, the burden of proof soon shifts to why shouldn’t we use cloud for more of IT," he says.

As has been the case with legacy IT for decades, the better the overall management, the better the adoption success, productivity and ROI for IT systems and apps they support -- no matter their location or IT achitecture. This same truth is now being applied to solve the cloud heterogeneity problem, just as it did the legacy platforms heterogeneity problem. The total visibility solution may be even more powerful in this new architectural era.

Cloud-first is business-first

The stakes now are even higher. As you migrate to the cloud, one weak link in a complex hybrid cloud deployment can ruin the end user experience, says Ali Siddiqui, general manager, Agile Operations, at CA. “By providing insight across the performance of all of an organization’s IT resources in a single and unified view, CA UIM gives users the power to choose the right mix of modern cloud enablement technologies.”

CA UIM reduces complexity of hybrid infrastructures by providing visibility across on-premises, private-, and public-cloud infrastructures through a single console UI. Such insight enables users to adopt new technologies and expand monitoring configurations across existing and new IT resource elements. CA expects the solution to reduce the need for multiple monitoring tools. [Disclosure: CA is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect.]

"Keep your life simple, from a monitoring and management perspective, regardless of your hybrid cloud [topology]," said Michael Morris, Senior Director Product Management, at CA Technologies, in a recent webcast.

To grease the skids to hybrid cloud adoption, CA UIM now supports advanced performance monitoring of Docker containers, PureStorage arrays, Nutanix hyperconverged systems, OpenStack cloud environments, and additional capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructures, CA Technologies announced last week.

CA is putting its IT systems management muscle behind the problem of migrating from data centers to the cloud, and then better supporting hybrid models, says Siddiqui. The "single-pane-of-glass" monitoring approach that CA is delivering allows measurement of and enforcement of SLAs before and after cloud migrations. This way, continuity of service and IT value-add can be preserved and measured, he added.

Managing a cloud ecoystem

"Using advanced monitoring and management can significantly cut costs of moving to cloud," says Siddiqui.
Indeed, CA is working with several prominent cloud and IT infrastructure partners to make the growing diversity of cloud implementations a positive, not a drawback. For example, "Virtualization tools are too constrained to specific hypervisors, so you need total cloud visibility," says Steve Kaplan, Vice President of Client Strategy at Nutanix, of CA's new offerings.

And it's not all performance monitoring. Enhancements to CA UIM’s coverage of AWS cloud infrastructures includes billing metrics and support for additional services that provide deeper, actionable insights on cloud brokering. 

CA UIM now also provides:

• Service-centric and unified analytics capabilities that rapidly identify the root cause of performance issues, resulting in a faster mean time to repair and better end user experience

• Out-of-the-box support for more than 140 on-premises and cloud technologies

• Templates for easier configuring of monitors that can be applied to groups of disparate systems.

What's more, to ensure the reliability of networks such as SDN/NFV that connect and scale hybrid cloud environments, CA has also delivered CA Virtual Network Assurance, which provides a common view of dynamic changes across virtual and physical network stacks, said CA.

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