News

CA Enhances Unicenter for On-Demand Computing

• By Stephen Swoyer
• May 01, 2003

So-called “on demand” or utility computing models typically describe an infrastructure for the virtualization of computing resources—such as storage, servers and networks—to increase performance, lower costs, or enhance overall manageability.

Among major vendors, IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), and Sun Microsystems Inc. have all announced variations on the utility computing theme that stress some combination of self-healing or “autonomic” hardware, intelligent software, and services offerings.

CA is unique in that it maintains that the benefits of on-demand computing can be achieved primarily through IT management rather than by an extensive overhaul of IT's systems and software.

CA representatives say the new or revamped Unicenter offerings leverage extensions to CA Common Services that provide shared Business Process Views, synchronization between business processes and IT resources, and self-management capabilities. The upshot, they say, is a management framework for on-demand computing: "By transforming Unicenter technology to provide the industry's first management platform for on-demand computing, CA is ensuring that our customers can achieve a new level of IT efficiency and alignment,” asserted Wai Wong, senior vice president and general manager of Unicenter solutions for CA, in a release.

Revamped Unicenter offerings include version 3.1 of Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM), which CA says enables IT organizations to view IT resources based on the services that they support—even in a dynamically changing environment.

Also enhanced is Unicenter Management for webMethods—now in version 3.0—which manages the performance and availability of the webMethods enterprise application integration platform. Unicenter Management for webMethods works in tandem with Unicenter NSM to dynamically associate applications and individual infrastructure components with the business processes they support in an on-demand environment.

CA has released version 4.0 of its Unicenter Software Delivery, which boasts self-healing and provisioning capabilities for applications and operating systems; version 4.0 of Unicenter Asset Management, which provides multi-dimensional software and hardware asset management capabilities; and version 6.0 of Unicenter ServicePlus Service Desk, which enables devices and applications to proactively and automatically interact with a help desk

A new Unicenter offering is the Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option, which works with Unicenter NSM to monitor business service levels. The Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option can anticipate when additional capacity is needed to improve performance, and allocate it as necessary.