Las Vegas – CA Technologies made major enhancements to its virtualization product line and announced a significant go-to-market strategy with Cisco Systems, (Nasdaq: CSCO) that will involve the networking giant’s Unified Computing System portfolio.
The CA Virtual portfolio will now include Virtual Assurance for uptime performance of private clouds; Virtual Automation for deploying and expanding private clouds; and Virtual Configuration which enables operational compliance on private clouds. The company also enhanced CA Spectrum Automation Manager for better control of hybrid heterogeneous physical and virtual clouds and Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, which was formerly called CA Virtual Performance Management. Virtual Assurance is an add-on product that is complimentary to CA Spectrum.
Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice- president and GM of CA’s virtualization business, said these new products and enhancements will help IT departments and those solution providers who provide IT services solve virtual stall issues which is increasing become a negative trends with mature virtual machines.
Pilc added that while virtualization has produced significant costs savings in low-risk servers that only represent 15 to 30 per cent of workloads it has also led to loss of control and scalability concerns.
Bringing Cisco UCS management and CA Virtual tools together in a bundled solution, Pilc said will provide the market place with a new business continuity solutions that will speed up business adoption of virtual environments because of the added protection and integration this combine technology offers.
“This will protect the data in physical and virtual worlds in an integrated fashion. CA supports the entire enterprise and many customers want multiple virtual machines on physical and cloud platforms for servers, networks, storage, applications and security,” Pilc said.
Ed Bugnion, vice-president and CTO of Cisco’s server access virtualization business, said with Cisco and CA organizations can new build and manage a shared high quality virtual environment that will be secure.
“UCS is the first platform from the ground up for the private cloud and virtualization. The notion is very fundamental; the problem for customers is to provide end-to-end multi-tenant cloud solutions that has a level of unification of hardware that is scalable across the network with dozens of blades. This offers that level of innovation and with Cisco’s open API it will provide a new opportunity for third party solution providers,” Bugnion said.
That has been able to develop an enterprise class of cloud services. The company, which specializes in data centre solutions, created the Cooperative Enterprise Cloud with UCS and CA. Company marketing director Chris Gabriel said that CA Cisco Virtual combination gave Logicalis a different take on the cloud which helped them better communication the advantages and benefits of the cloud to prospective CIOs. “CIOs were now able to understand workload deployment in a local environment or hosted and that it could give them virtualization principles without an hyper visor,” he said.
With this solution Logicalis was able to enter the cloud market within months and creating a competitive commercial advantage for the solution provider, Gabriel said.
CA Canada GM Jimmy Fulton said that the Canadian opportunity is vast because Cisco has a large customer base and so does CA Canada. The bundled solution creates more cloud capabilities for customers. Fulton said that bringing the two channel bases together is getting his attention. “To me this sounds like leverage and if more people are talking about our technology through Cisco and its partners it means we’ll be in a lot more places than before. Same goes for Cisco,” Fulton said.
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