CA Overhauls Key Storage Management Line

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Computer Associates has completed a major overhaul of its
storage management software, updating and packaging its products into one
“integrated, intelligent” line.

The Islandia, N.Y., enterprise software maker has refreshed BrightStor r11.1, positioning it
as a new generation of intelligent storage management software to help
businesses protect their corporate data assets with great cost efficiency.

A key piece of the company’s broad, new “management on-demand” strategy, CA
is making the aggressive push to combat rivals Veritas Software and EMC , two of the most formidable storage
management software vendors in the market today.

Anders Lofgren, vice president of BrightStor Product Management at CA, said
the integrated suite is geared to blow away “stovepipe” point products from
rivals, managing storage that over time has become very complex. To combat
this, vendors have traditionally thrown multiple tools with different
licensing at problems to solve complexity.

“Resource utilization hasn’t been the greatest strength in the storage
industry,” Lofgren told internetnews.com. “A lot of people have
solved problems by throwing more disk drives at it and that’s why we’ve
ended up here. The problem’s not going away… complexity grows
exponentially.”

CA plans to remedy complexity by helping customers streamline their
infrastructure and provide it on-demand, driving down cost. For example, one
new product, BrightStor Process Automation Manager, provides provisions
BrightStor software to automate storage tasks across the enterprise.

The other products are refreshes. BrightStor Enterprise Backup and ARCserve
Backup have been combined to form BrightStor ARCserve Backup r 11.1. This
integrated software lets customers manage backup and recovery jobs from
desktops to data centers on platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix, Netware
and Linux OS for IBM zSeries.

BrightStor r 11.1 also supports such databases and applications as Advantage
Ingres, Oracle, DB2, Microsoft Exchange, People Soft, SAP R/3 and Sybase.
More broadly, the line now supports more than 100 storage arrays, tape
libraries, SAN switches, severs, operating systems, databases and
applications.

In other updates, there are new versions of BrightStor High Availability,
the company’s application failover software, as well as updated BrightStor
Storage Resource Manager, BrightStor SAN Manager and BrightStor CA-Vantage
and CA-Allocate storage resource management products.

In one example, integration of BrightStor SRM and BrightStor SAN Manager
allows the customer to reduce costs through better understanding of their
assets.

“One of the things we’ll be able to deliver in r11.1 is full-path
visualization so you can look all the way from my Oracle, SQL or Exchange
application down to the spindle and everything in between, allowing you to
see how your storage infrastructure supports your business process,” Lofgren
said.

Enterprise Management Associates analyst Mike Karp approved of the refresh.

“This is a pretty significant refresh,” Karp said. “Everything now seems to work from a set of common services, which makes for more efficiency in terms of both the way things operate and (maybe more importantly) in terms of reducing development time.”

BrightStor r11.1 is available under CA’s FlexSelect licensing program. The
company is also offering BrightStor Managed Capacity Pricing, a licensing
model based on terabyte capacity that allows customer to pay as they go,
similar to a utility computing model, although CA does not use that term.

Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton is an Enterprise Storage Forum contributor and a senior writer for CIO.com covering IT leadership, the CIO role, and digital transformation.

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