Computerworld - Las Vegas—Boosting the automation of security and systems management was Computer Associates International Inc.'s key focus at last week's CA World 2003 user conference here.
The effort is built around a new architecture dubbed Sonar that CA will begin to roll out later this year. The technology aims to dynamically and securely allocate available server or storage resources to the business processes that are most important at a particular point in time.
Over the past several years, CA has been steadily enhancing its software to help IT shops prioritize resource allocation. But the Sonar technology for the first time will automate management according to predefined business rules.
In a keynote speech, CEO Sanjay Kumar explained that Sonar will look for IT assets, catalog them and then decide how they will be delivered to support a particular business process. Sonar will be embedded in CA products rather than sold as a stand-alone product, according to the company.
Pieces of Sonar technology will start to appear early in the fourth quarter. Already in beta is the Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option for VMware Software, which dynamically decides what resources are needed to meet performance requirements. Also in beta is the BrightStor Process Automation Manager, which will handle the provisioning of storage resources across multiple platforms. It will ship in 120 days.
Several users at the conference said they would be interested in Sonar if CA delivers on the promise.
The technology might help address the demand to cut down on the costs of idle hardware and the people needed to manage it, said Clark Ammons, production and systems manager of information systems at Washington University in St. Louis.
Some of the university's servers remain idle most of the time but are needed for occasional spikes in demand, such as when students are registering for classes, Ammons said. That hardware could be better exploited during downtimes, allowing the university to make do with what it has rather than having to buy new servers.
"I'd be foolish not to look at [Sonar]," Ammons said.
It appears CA may be the first vendor to deliver policy-driven software that works on a business-process level, said Rick Ptak, an analyst at Ptak & Associates Inc. in Amherst, N.H.
CA also announced the rollout of eTrust Vulnerability Manager, which IT shops can use proactively to discover and correct security vulnerabilities in the enterprise. The software comes bundled on what CA is calling a rack-mountable Dell Computer Corp. appliance running Windows 2000 Server.
The product will prioritize systems by their business value, checking them against an internal database that contains a catalog of more than 6,000 vulnerabilities. It automatically creates a remediation checklist that IT staffers can use to fix problems.
Last month I blogged about the partnerships you should build inside your organization. In keeping with that tone it's time we discussed expanding that partnership mentality to include some of the best technical resources you can ever get hold of, those are the ones that work in your neighboring cities, municipalities, counties, regions, townships etc. Come on folks, these people are already doing exactly the same things as you!
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