New CA Workload Automation Solution Optimizes Dynamic And Service-Oriented Infrastructures

CA (NYSE: CA) today announced the delivery of a new Workload Automation Solution designed to optimize real-time performance across diverse enterprise infrastructures—including both distributed and mainframe environments. By evolving its portfolio of traditional job scheduling tools into CA Workload Automation, CA is enabling IT organizations to improve control over the dynamic execution of workloads required by today’s complex business processes.

CA Workload Automation orchestrates the alignment of business processes and IT services by embedding automatic workload triggers into existing workflows. CA’s “service-oriented automation” approach connects infrastructure components and events to the execution of business and IT processes. This service-enabling of existing jobs and processes without redesign or recoding dramatically reduces development times and improves visibility and control of business workflows.

With policy-based workload prioritization, CA Workload Automation protects the integrity of business-critical processes. Production workflows are graphically represented end-to-end, and automatic notification of exceptions ensures the appropriate urgency in responding to potential failures or delays. The dynamic, real-time nature of the solution reflects the evolution from task or job scheduling based on date and time to streamlined workflows with embedded workloads based on events and policies.

“The currency of today’s service-driven infrastructures is counted in increments of jobs or computing tasks,” stated Richard Ptak, founder and principal analyst, Ptak Noel & Associates. “Driving these workloads based on policies and events will enable organizations to reap significant gains in terms of flexibility and efficiencies. With this new release, CA continues to demonstrate strong vision for this market.”

Foundational components of the new CA Workload Automation solution leverage Web services and an event-based architecture to integrate disparate workload processes into cohesive workflows that can be accessed through a unified management portal, called the CA Workload Control Center. CA Workload Automation includes a new version of CA’s advanced policy-based workload engine for distributed environments—CA AutoSys Workload Automation r11. The solution also extends to include technology CA acquired from Cybermation for dynamic workload management of both mainframe and distributed environments, called CA ESP Workload Automation.

The new solution demonstrates CA’s significant investment in integration across its product portfolio, protecting and extending customer investment in CA technology. For example, CA AutoSys Workload Automation integrates with Unicenter Service Desk to automate the creation of trouble tickets and accelerate problem resolution. CA Embedded Entitlements Manager, part of CA’s Identity and Access Management solution, helps ensure secure administrator access to CA Workload Automation.

CA Workload Automation helps to ensure datacenters deliver on their service level agreements by delivering intelligent resource management with critical path monitoring. By combining historical performance data with real-time event sensing, CA Workload Automation can help IT staff identify and automatically resolve workload conflicts before they impact end users. CA Workload Automation enables organizations to view multiple servers across an infrastructure with similar classifications as a logical pool of resources. As a result, it can dynamically allocate workloads to the most available resources within the resource pool, helping to maximize utilization and increase the reliability of critical business processes.

“In today’s service-oriented enterprise, workload processing demands are no longer predictable,” said Will Bauman, senior vice president, CA. “With CA Workload Automation, we are delivering a new service-oriented generation of business processing tools for managing dynamic workload execution across all platform types. This is a core business for CA, and we are committed to evolving these solutions rapidly as the market matures.”

The core components of the CA Workload Automation solution provide platform support for distributed, mainframe and mid-market computing environments:

-CA Workload Control Center – a cross-platform, secure web portal to monitor and control workloads across the enterprise from a central point of control. CA Workload Control Center is a fully customizable workflow management tool, with an executive dashboard view, operational discussion boards, and enterprise reporting capabilities.
-CA AutoSys Workload Automation r11 – a highly scalable, event-driven workload automation solution for distributed environments.
-CA ESP Workload Automation r5.5 – an event-driven workload engine to manage dynamic workloads across mainframe infrastructures.
-CA-7 Workload Automation r11 – a fully integrated workload automation solution capable of coordinating and executing business process execution across enterprises leveraging a mainframe-based infrastructure.
-CA dSeries Workload Automation – a feature-rich, event-driven workload automation solution for medium sized distributed environments.

Most enterprises today have complex, multi-platform infrastructures supporting highly distributed and often unpredictable business processes. Service level-based workload management allows business service level requirements to be tied to the execution and monitoring of workloads, as well as the automatic resolution of conflicts before workload processes fall out of SLA compliance. Leveraging Web services enables CA Workload Automation to be embedded into existing business process workflow, to better ensure service availability across both distributed, mainframe, and heterogeneous infrastructures.