CA's network managers 'not just for networks anymore'

CA has taken the word "network" out of the names of its Spectrum and eHealth performance management platforms, signaling that the newest versions of those products, whose focus has expanded to virtualized data center environments and databases, aren't just for networks anymore.

Release 9.1 of CA's Spectrum Infrastructure Manager now applies to physical and virtualized data centers the performance management capabilities that it once applied just to carrier networks. For example, the software picks up alerts and alarms on virtual and physical servers, understands the relevance of those alarms to related infrastructure, can isolate faults and perform root-cause analysis.

Spectrum places an agent on the server that hosts VMWare's virtualized data center management console and frequently communicates with VMWare's system.

As telecom service providers move more toward virtualized data centers, using the same software to manage those environments that they already used to manage their networks simplifies operations but also could cut out blame games between networking and data center people, CA said.

"If you have a dedicated server management team that doesn't talk to the network team, there's a lot of finger-pointing," said Steve Guthrie, CA's director of product marketing. "It's all about mean time to innocence."

Likewise, release 6.1.1 of CA's eHealth Performance manager, which takes a more proactive approach toward analyzing performance and aids in capacity planning, includes support for physical and virtual servers.