* CA's summer releases of storage offerings for SMBs and enterprises
Today we will look at the products Computer Associates is rolling out this summer, and align them for you according to the various markets CA expects them to serve.
Expect the next general release of BrightStor – Revision 11.5 – to hit the streets sometime in September, although it is likely that you or some of your friends may already have seen the beta releases.
CA sees the main storage challenges for smaller businesses as business continuity – particularly the protection of Microsoft Exchange, file servers and SQL servers, ease of use, and ease of deployment. For this user segment the company offers the BrightStor ARCserve Backup Suite (backup and recovery for Windows, Linux, NetWare, Unix, laptops and desktops) and the High Availability Suite (data replication that allows a single secondary server to back up multiple primary servers). Both are designed for companies with a simple infrastructure and a staff of generalists.
For small and midsize businesses, CA’s products focus on cost control, risk mitigation and business continuity, so the company has added BrightStor SRM (for managing data security, space and growth concerns across heterogeneous environments) and BrightStor SAN Manager (modules for storage-area network design, discovery, security, provisioning and “business-centric management”).
When it comes the enterprise, which for a long time has been CA’s main stock in trade, CA has lined up a number of high-value services that it feels will appeal to managers of sophisticated IT operations. These include integrated management of several aspects of storage, enterprise application support extending across desktops, laptops, distributed servers and mainframes, and new licensing and pricing structures so that a company’s investment in CA products scales economically as their management needs grow.
When your CA rep next lands on your doorstep, expect to be shown the new suites that CA has put together. The first of these is the Storage Management Suite, a bundle that includes Brightstor’s Storage Resource Manager, the SAN Manager, the SAN Designer and the Process Automation Manager, all collectively aimed at providing asset management, asset utilization, and growth management to help you meet your SLAs. The Data Availability Suite contains Brightstor Storage Resource Manager, ARCserve Backup, ARCserve Backup for laptops and desktops, and ARCserve High Availability. The contents of these bundles are all still available as individual products, but expect to see some aggressive pricing if you are interested in the whole package.
Managing most (all?) of this will be the BrightStor Storage Command Center, a single console from which a manager can look at all of an enterprise’s storage assets. This will be of particular interest to those of you who want to oversee your storage assets, capacity, health and data protection from one dashboard that offers both real-time and historical analysis of what is going on. A particularly useful feature is likely to be the ability to understand up front what business processes are going to be affected if a device fails.
Expect the Storage Command Center to be integrated with CA’s systems management software soon, along with the network and security infrastructures some time down the line.
If all of this really does decrease the cost and complexity of managing your storage, then good for CA and good for you! Now is the time for the world’s fifth largest software company to show the world what it’s got.
