CA updates cloud management software

Software vendor CA Technologies has refreshed its cloud comparison tool as part of its 'Cloud Choice' suite of 10 new or updated products, launched today.

The new Business Service Insight 8.0 replaced CA’s Cloud Insight, which was built on technology that CA bought with Oblicore in January last year.

It used enterprises’ existing IT monitoring services to analyse the performance of internal and external services based on six characteristics: agility; risk; security; cost; quality; and capability.

The tool also ‘crowdsourced’ data from CA’s Cloud Commons community to rate public cloud services including those offered by Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Salesforce.com.

CA also introduced new versions of its Virtual Placement Manager, AppLogic, Unified Communications Monitor and Automation Suite for Data Centres.

Its new Automation Suite for Clouds allowed enterprise IT managers to rapidly deploy ‘private clouds’ to provide infrastructure as a service for testing and development environments.

Automation Suite for Data Centres allowed IT mangers to move workloads between public and private clouds.

Automation Suite for Clouds supported Fujitsu, Unisys, and VCE kit, while the Automation Suite for Data Centres supported Rackspace, Amazon, Hyper-V, VMware, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP UNIX and IBM LPARS environments.

Meanwhile, AppLogic 3.0 allowed enterprises to run applications and services using VMware ESX and Xen hypervisors on the same grid, as well as import workloads using the Open Virtualisation Format.

According to CA vice president of virtualisation product marketing Andi Mann, the software addressed enterprise demand for "heterogeneous environments".

Mann said the software aimed to prevent vendor lock-in. But CA provided no support for migrating away from its own workload management tools.

“It’s probably difficult to get out of that,” he acknowledged. “The question is, why would you?”

Mann urged IT managers to strive for greater oversight of their IT resources, and “start thinking about themselves as a service provider for their business”.

He highlighted an increase in ‘rogue clouds’ – services purchased by independent staff or teams without approval from the business and IT managers.

“There’s a reason why rogue cloud exists; from our point of view, you should always try to leverage the cloud” he said.

One organisation found itself with an unexpected bill of $100,000 one month, he said, after staff had provided corporate credit card details to a cloud service provider and neglected to terminate the service after it was used.