TECHNOLOGY AUDIT
CA Automation Suite for Data
Centers, Release 12.6
CA Technologies
Reference Code: OI00070-108 Publication Date: November 2011 Authors: Roy Illsley and Alan Rodger
SUMMARY
Catalyst
Most organizations consider automation in terms of codification of run books. However, this perception limits the imagination and restricts the potential of what data center automation can achieve. Realizing the full potential of data center automation requires organizations to recognize that business transformation is also needed.
Currently, most IT processes and procedures operate on a people-centric model. While this fits with most organizational structures, it does not map to an automated model of operational excellence; rather, it stifles the potential improvements to service-level agreements (SLAs) and quality of service that business users could experience. When the prospect of cloud computing is introduced, the role of automation and the changes needed to the process models become more than "nice-to-haves;" they become a central tenet of IT delivery.
CA Technologies offers CA Automation Suite for Data Centers as a solution formulated to enable organizations to manage and exploit virtualized and cloud-based resources alongside existing assets.
The solution masks the underlying complexity of different technologies in the operational environment, but enforces strong, policy-based management built on user-defined criteria to implement business needs.
It is modularized, so that organizations can take manageable steps towards more mature management of their infrastructure.
Key findings
Table 1: CA Automation Suite for Data Centers: key findings
Strengths: Addresses requirements across heterogeneous virtualized/non-virtualized environments. Enterprise-strength support for automation processes across the design and deployment lifecycle. Technology complexity is abstracted from tasks whenever possible, treating machine types individually.
Seamless integration of cloud-based resources, including managed "cloud bursting." Extensive and well-integrated range of support for virtualized and cloud-based resources. Weaknesses: The newly expanded scope of this solution is later to market than its major competitors, but
designed to meet the current needs and challenges that virtualization and cloud computing bring. Key facts: Detailed, specialist management of network and storage infrastructures is also addressed in the
integrated data center automation and management solutions from CA Technologies.
Source: Ovum O V U M
Ovum view
IT service management (ITSM) has grown from the development and industrialization of standard repeatable processes for the IT department. The objective of ITSM is to make IT as efficient as possible, but these processes were developed and codified for manual, human-based, IT
operation. The new automation capabilities that are enabled by technologies such as virtualization provide, in theory, much improved service-level delivery. However, the current set of processes is not designed for dealing with this automation capability. These IT processes must be separated into a "machine layer" and a "human layer," so that organizations can understand how automation capabilities can be integrated into their IT operations.
Automation is becoming an essential approach to infrastructure management, to allow
organizations to deal with the many demands that converge in this area. Lack of automation is already preventing organizations from benefiting from newer technologies. For example, lack of dynamic management to enforce business needs in a virtualized environment results in greater labor costs, which can obliterate the hardware cost savings that the technology makes possible. Increasingly, organizations looking at adoption of a cloud approach recognize that adding cloud-based resources to the management of their existing environment would fail to yield benefits if managing manually, and reactively, were the only option. Indeed, costs may well increase. Across all types of technology usage, the enforcement of business control and compliance is essential in
today's corporate environment, whether to ensure the right security protection is in place or to keep the asset inventory under control. Underlying this growing list of requirements is the need for efficiency, and cost reduction continues to be a focus as enterprises try to cope with all of these needs and the greater demands on the IT function generally.
CA Technologies re-launched its well-established range of service automation offerings in 2010, with newly developed and purpose-built support for managing cloud-based and virtualized resources. It now supports a common customer preference to adopt capabilities incrementally, while delivering, in each module, a strong set of integrated capabilities that achieve discrete benefits.
CA Automation Suite for Data Centers offers deep support for multi-vendor heterogeneous platforms and provides cohesive, unified, physical, virtual, and cloud automation across all data center domains, including VMs, applications, servers, storage, and networks. It also supports new converged infrastructures from VCE, NetApp, and Cisco. Solution capabilities include integrated change tracking, compliance management, and automated provisioning across the entire IT infrastructure. An abstraction layer enables users to perform the same operation in different vendor environments using a common approach, which speeds and simplifies system management by collapsing the learning curve and requiring less specialized skills. It brings some advanced
features, especially for supporting and managing virtualized resources, such as the ability to create self-service portals that allow users to provision and de-provision their own resources for
application testing, development, training, production, and cloud environments. Other "out of the box" capabilities include integrated chargeback and showback, resource pooling, and dynamic VM provisioning – without complex custom scripting or expensive services engagements.
CA Technologies solution was launched more recently than competitive offerings from HP and BMC. As a result, they gain advantages by including purpose-built, powerful facilities supporting the use of cloud-based and virtualized resources, rather than re-architecting older technology. Their challenge will be increasing awareness of this solution.
Recommendations
Mid-sized and large organizations looking to transform their existing data centers, at their own pace, into a more cloud-ready environment, should strongly consider this offering from CA Technologies, especially as it provides so well for managing the use of physical, cloud-based, and virtualized resources.
Existing CA Technologies customers will benefit additionally from reuse of aspects of their existing licensed estate, and also can plan around the company's vision of
further integration with service catalog, service assurance, and capacity management solutions.
Smaller organizations without the complexities of heterogeneous and legacy technologies may wish to consider simpler management options, perhaps investigating solutions that are available as online services.
FUNCTIONALITY
Solution overview
Figure 1: CA Automation Suite for Data Centers solution architecture
Source: CA Technologies O V U M
CA Automation Suite for Data Centers (see Figure 1) is a modular solution that automates critical data center management processes across a wide range of heterogeneous physical, virtual, and public cloud environments. It enables rapid delivery of services in response to changing business needs, to improve productivity and efficiency while preparing for a smoother and less expensive transition to cloud computing. The solution is delivered in four modules:
CA Server Automation CA Configuration Automation CA Process Automation CA Network Automation.
CA Server Automation dynamically provisions, patches, and deploys applications and servers across physical and virtual systems based on standard templates and metric-driven policies. It provides two-way rapid migration, supporting all major operating systems and virtual containers. It captures an operational system's "image" (comprising the applications, configuration information, and operating system) from the live environment and stores it in a library. This functionality can be used to deploy images to all kinds of X86-based hardware environments, migrating to or from physical or virtual environments, depending on policy and the drivers of availability and demand.
CA Server Automation also provides automated, self-service VM provisioning, policy-based management of resource pools, and can track individual VMs for chargeback accounting and usage reporting. Users can manage chargeback and usage information via a self-service portal, enabling it to be integrated with other data. The module's policy-based management includes capacity management, and this forms the foundation for its ability to self-provision additional resources ("burst") from sources in public clouds (Amazon EC2 is currently supported). Public cloud resources can be reserved and rapidly provisioned by automated processes in a vastly shorter time.
CA Configuration Automation automates application configuration and change management across distributed applications. It enables configuration comparisons across heterogeneous environments, comparing discovered systems with "blueprint" standards that are included with the solution. Integration with CA Server Automation enables users to enforce standard configurations by running ongoing configuration compliance audits. Reporting shows deviation from user-defined best practices in software and environment configuration, and compliance can be monitored and remediated. The tool also builds up an inventory of software assets, using either an agent or agent-less discovery, including deep intra-device and inter-device dependency mapping with topology visualization that can be used to inform enterprise management initiatives.
CA Process Automation supports IT organizations' needs to design, develop, and deploy
automated processes to replace legacy manual and resource-intensive operational procedures. It provides control over starting, stopping, and modifying processes, and stopping and rerouting in-process workflows based on changing conditions, which reduces risk. Enterprise-class architecture supports scalability to automate a single application or a global set of data centers. It has a visual
process designer (see Figure 2) for design and development, the results of which are used by its automation orchestrator to deploy and manage those processes in complex, heterogeneous environments. Its lifecycle manager and automation library facilities provide support for the management of processes, segregation of roles, audit trails, alignment with compliance needs, and process persistence.
CA Process Automation Power Packs are available to help reduce the time and effort required to develop, implement, and manage automated processes for business-critical workloads. Power Packs help users with:
cloud: dynamically move workloads to private or public clouds to meet demand and SLAs
lifecycle management: automate the process of moving workloads from development to production remediation: to automate notification, remediation, and creation of service-desk tickets
for defined events
self-service: ad hoc job request management, approval, and execution health check: validate the configuration of workload environments.
Figure 2: Graphical view of process within CA Process Automation
Source: CA Technologies O V U M
CA Network Automation automates repetitive network operational processes and tasks such as pushing new or updated configuration settings to devices, performing OS upgrades, or deploying patches. These changes are automatically logged for tracking and auditing purposes. The solution discovers and analyzes poor or suboptimal configurations throughout the network without requiring manual intervention, and can then remediate issues (individually or en masse) before they affect overall performance. Topology views illustrate the multi-dimensional relationships of network devices, overlaying the status of change, network health, and policy compliance. Built-in compliance rules, policies, and reports enable users to manage standards and demonstrate compliance quickly for either internal audits or external mandates such as PCI, ISO, SOX, HIPAA, and DISA.
Solution analysis
Provisioning
Within CA Server Automation, users can choose from an array of automated provisioning
technologies that support image mobility and portability to cover virtually every scenario, including initial provisioning, capacity scaling, service recovery, and self-service. Additionally, users can
define ways in which resources can be made available to the automated provisioning processes, including specification of configuration details, mapping of storage and network resources to the system, which software template should be added or which servers should be used. By monitoring and analyzing critical application and infrastructure data, the solution dynamically responds to configuration errors, application performance metrics, and system utilization changes with coordinated, policy-based action. The solution also integrates with NetApp OnCommand provisioning manager to provide automated storage provisioning based on user-defined storage policies for availability, performance, thin provisioning, replication, and disaster recovery.
Migration of workloads
The solution can manage workloads across and between physical, virtual, and cloud
environments, seamlessly and in any direction. Machines can carry on operating as normal while this migration takes place. If migration involves transfer of the workload to a different server type, the management capabilities provide the right type of drivers to enable correct operation in the target environment.
Process automation
The visual design environment used for process design is strong in terms of process support, incorporating features such as task execution, process loops, delays, and actions approvals (supported by role definitions). It supports calls to third-party processes, as well as to facilities provided by CA Technologies. It has a similar look-and-feel to Microsoft Visio, so for many users it is easy to understand. The complete process lifecycle is supported, from the design phase to deployment, operation, and incorporation of change.
Visualization
Figure 3: Dashboard showing application configuration details
Source: CA Technologies O V U M
Figure 3 shows an example of a display that would be generated and routed to a user to prompt inspection of an environment, triggered by a metric exceeding a predefined limit. A metric would then be defined in order to stem a potential or existing problem's root cause, or to monitor against a predefined standard for an environment.
The solution allows users to click through from business-level reporting to system metrics. At the more detailed level, the approach is to abstract underlying technology complexity when possible. For example, all types of servers are viewed in the same way, to allow the user to focus on what they really want to do, rather than on a large range of options.
Policy management
The policy management functions enable users to build rules by defining actions to be undertaken depending on the evaluation of conditional expressions. The user is prompted to define how attributes and conditions are to be handled within expressions, according to the type of rule. Rules can be combined and actions can be chained together, in definition and execution of policy.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
The name of this solution was formerly CA Spectrum Automation Manager until, accompanying a broadened scope in mid-2010, it was changed to CA Automation Suite for Data Centers. Releases follow an Agile development schedule, with current plans as follows.
Enhancement of server mobility capabilities between local physical or virtual systems and resources managed by third-party providers.
Ongoing enhancements to support new versions of IBM AIX and Oracle Sun
operating systems, Solaris zones, and IBM AIX LPARs, and additional enhancements to quick start wizards to further simplify provisioning physical systems.
Ongoing enhancements to support new versions of hypervisor platforms.
Delivery of features that align with customer needs to achieve operational efficiencies and reduce operational costs.
CA Technologies' strategy includes extending support for and enablement of private cloud usage. To that end, the solution now includes integration with CA AppLogic, a turnkey cloud platform that is ideal for rapidly deploying applications on homogeneous x86 servers for on-demand delivery. The platform virtualizes the application and its entire infrastructure, and abstracts it into a single object or “virtualized business service” which can be created, replicated, or migrated very quickly. Additionally, CA Automation Suite for Clouds was announced in July 2011. This suite includes all of the components and capabilities of CA Automation Suite for Data Centers, and adds CA Service Catalog and pre-integrated workflows that are designed specifically to support best-practice private cloud use cases, right "out of the box."
Market opportunity
CA Technologies believes that data center automation is now better understood and accepted by customers. The approach is becoming more widespread, as server consolidation and increased adoption of virtualization drives the uptake of data center automation. Furthermore, due to the need to react to service levels in real time, automation is a vital foundation for using infrastructure
based on private or public clouds, either as an end-user organization or as a service provider using this infrastructure as a basis for service offerings.
Customers of the solution are typically global enterprise organizations (i.e. with annual revenues over $500m) in a number of industry sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, government, gaming, and hospitality. Business from the service provider sector has been growing rapidly, with several large service provider customers using the solution as a platform on which to build an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. Increasing data center development due to the growth of outsourcing is also generating sales, particularly in India. CIOs or directors and VPs of IT operations (infrastructure and/or data centers) are the main sales targets within organizations.
Go-to-market strategy
The US, Western Europe, India, and Japan are the main target markets for sales of this solution. Sales are direct and via channel partners. Key implementation and distribution partners include Logicalis, Empowered Networks, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bull, PureSCM, and WindWard Consulting.
IMPLEMENTATION
Overview
CA Technologies states that a pilot implementation can usually be achieved in less than one week, given an appropriate scope of objectives. Such an exercise would typically involve one CA
Technologies consultant and an experienced member of the IT function in the customer
organization. The same number of resources is able to implement the solution for department-level requirements, approximately 30 users, in less than one month. A larger, enterprise-wide
implementation would also take less than a month, but may require up to double the number of consultants and IT staff.
CA Technologies claims that over 100 customers use elements of the solution or the whole integrated solution.
Logicalis, a global provider of ICT solutions and services to more than 5,000 corporate and public sector customers, uses the solution to provision customer cloud
environments quickly and transition workloads between virtual servers based on demand and capacity.
Mainroad, an enterprise which manages over 2,000 servers, uses the solution for provisioning and disaster recovery.
Table 2: CA Technologies contact details
CA Technologies Inc. World Headquarters One CA Plaza Islandia NY 11749 USA Tel: +1 800 225 5224 Fax: +1 631 342 6800 www.ca.com CA Technologies Ltd UK Headquarters
Ditton Park, Riding Court Road Datchet, Slough Berkshire, SL3 9LL UK Tel: +44 (0)1753 577733 Fax: +44 (0)1753 825464 Source: Ovum O V U M
APPENDIX
Further reading
Infrastructure Management: Driving Increased Business Value Through the Strategic Use of IT
(December 2009)
Methodology
Ovum Technology Audits are independent product reviews carried out using Ovum’s evaluation model for the relevant technology area, supported by conversations with vendors, users, and service providers of the solution concerned, and in-depth secondary research.
Authors
Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Software IT Solutions
Alan Rodger, Senior Analyst, Software IT Solutions
alan.rodger@ovum.com
Ovum Consulting
We hope that the analysis in this brief will help you make informed and imaginative business decisions. If you have further requirements, Ovum’s consulting team may be able to help you. For more information about Ovum’s consulting capabilities, please contact us directly at
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