CA Announces a Comprehensive Solution for Integrated Infrastructure Availability and Performance Management across Physical and Virtualized IT Domains

New Versions of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will Enable Lean IT by Proactively Preventing and Rapidly Resolving Problems Across the Entire IT Infrastructure

ISLANDIA, N.Y. – CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA) today announced an enhanced solution for integrated infrastructure availability and performance management for enterprises, government agencies and service providers. CA Spectrum® Infrastructure Manager r9.1 and CA eHealth® Performance Manager r6.1.1 will address key business service requirements for managing fast-growing virtualized environments, networked application flows, IP telephony applications, MPLS network services, and carrier-class service delivery platforms. The new versions of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will be available in 2009.

For organizations focused on maximizing IT value and minimizing cost, this solution will help assure service delivery, improve management efficiency, and mitigate the risk of business disruption from infrastructure outages. It is among 13 new and enhanced products announced today by CA that help CIOs achieve Lean IT by reducing waste, increasing productivity and improving the customer experience.

“The pressure has never been greater for IT to keep services running with 24x7 reliability and high levels of performance,” said Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates. “Meeting this challenge requires an integrated paradigm, so engineering and operations teams can approach service assurance from a systemic standpoint. This means finding management tools and practices that bring together monitoring and management of all of the interconnected elements which make up the service delivery infrastructure, including networks, voice and unified communications systems, physical and virtual servers, and databases. Only in this way is it possible to fully understand how incidents and problems impact applications and business services.”

Managing Virtual Infrastructure

These new releases of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will provide extensive, integrated management for virtual systems. The ability to manage physical and virtual infrastructure from a single pane of glass will save IT from having to acquire, learn and maintain separate tools. New functionality will include the ability to discover, visualize, monitor performance, isolate faults, conduct powerful root cause and impact analysis, track virtual machine movement and view utilization of VMware environments.

“These are significant releases of CA Spectrum and CA eHealth because customers are finding fault and performance challenges as they grow their virtual system deployments,” said Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation business unit. “Combining networks and physical and virtual systems management in our integrated solution will support Lean IT, enabling customers to leverage a comprehensive fault and performance solution to efficiently manage expanding virtual environments.”

“As VMware virtualization becomes the platform of choice for customers deploying private clouds, they can greatly benefit from comprehensive availability and performance management of virtualized systems in the seamless context of end-to-end enterprise management solutions that span networks, physical systems, databases and applications,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of Infrastructure Alliances, VMware. “Enterprise customers can experience greater ease-of use, time-to-value and improved total cost of ownership from such solutions, and we are pleased to see the breadth and depth of CA’s Spectrum and eHealth management of virtualized systems.”

“Virtualization technology has become an essential tool to build and deploy our applications on time and at a much lower cost. CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager helps to remove some of the additional complexity of managing virtual environments by making them look like just another device in our data centers,” said Donavan Pantke, network engineer at Appriss. “Our operations staff can now leverage existing tools over a broader set of technologies, allowing us to transition to virtualization quickly and with minimal disruption to existing business processes.”

Support for Service Providers

The enhanced CA solution will include new functionality that gives service providers deeper insight and management capability to help prevent degradations and resolve problems before they impact revenue-generating services or cause service level agreement violations.

As adoption of IP services running over MPLS networks increases, new challenges require management solutions that ensure network health so service providers can effectively deliver new services that drive revenues. The CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager MPLS Transport Manager, a new solution for discovering and monitoring MPLS traffic engineered networks, will automatically identify faults that could impact the delivery of services to customers.

With the advent of massive data transfers in the scientific community it serves, the Energy Sciences Network is reliant on rapid resolution time for incidents that impact its service sensitive applications. “With the amount of raw data originating at CERN, for example, we cannot tolerate much downtime or we’ll never catch up processing the data once we’re back online,” said Mike O’Connor, network engineer, who recently tested the new CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager MPLS Transport Manager. “Insight into our traffic engineered MPLS network down to the labeled switched path level should improve resolution time for circuit issues by an order of magnitude. Rapid resolution is critical to achieving not only our 99.9% availability SLA but sustaining our current 99.997% rating, which we’ve been able to achieve over the past 2 years with CA Spectrum as our infrastructure management tool.”

CA eHealth Performance Manager will also have new functionality to provide proactive performance management of important carrier-class telecommunications infrastructure. CA eHealth Performance Manager will support the Alcatel-Lucent 5620 SAM Element Management System, which is especially important for service providers that deploy Alcatel 7450 and 7750 core switches. CA eHealth Performance Manager will identify performance degradations in the core networks before services are disrupted and customers are impacted.

Additional New Features Support Lean IT

CA eHealth Performance Manager will include new out-of-the-box functionality and integration capabilities that help IT to achieve efficiencies and deliver value more quickly across a broader set of IT domains. For example, tight integrations with CA eHealth Traffic Accountant for network traffic and bandwidth management, and CA eHealth Database Performance Option for proactive multi-vendor database performance management, consolidates management for network devices, network traffic, physical and virtual systems, and databases into a single performance management solution.

CA eHealth Performance Manager will also add new proactive performance management for IP telephony applications based on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Siemens HiPath™ voice systems. This new capability will provide automated data collection, performance analysis, and a rich set of reports for both the infrastructure as well as the IP telephony application. This will provide customers with a single solution that manages both the converged network and the unified communications application, helping to reduce the management tool footprint and administrative overhead. In addition to new systems and IP telephony management capabilities, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will also have new capability to integrate with the CA eHealth Database Performance Option to proactively manage the availability and performance of DB2® for Linux, UNIX and Windows®, as well as Oracle®, Microsoft® SQL Server® and Sybase® databases.

Radius and SAML authentication support will expand CA eHealth Performance Manager’s security capabilities. This will enable enterprises and managed service providers to extend authentication mechanisms for customer self-service and performance reporting access across their organizations.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager are sold by both CA’s direct sales force and CA’s global network of channel partners. Depending on geography, the products can be licensed on either a per-server or per-device basis.

CA Services is available to provide comprehensive implementation services that enable customers to accelerate the time to value of their investment, mitigate implementation risk and improve the alignment between IT and business processes. The group’s newest offering is Network Management for Distributed Rapid Implementation. This service allows the customer to choose CA eHealth Performance Manager and/or CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and offers a choice of 500, 1000, 1500 or 2000 devices to discover. The deployment may also include the CA eHealth Live Exceptions Dashboard Add-On Services Component to provide a single-pane view of alarms.