CA introduced a Service Availability solution that helps IT organizations ensure the delivery of critical business services by unifying and simplifying the management of the complex, heterogeneous technology infrastructure that supports those services.

CA Service Availability provides customers with tools to improve service, minimize downtime, reduce the cost of IT operations, and tune their service-oriented infrastructures to respond more nimbly to business change. Powered by major new Unicenter releases and technology from CA's business services optimization, storage management and security management business units, it is delivered as a customizable package of technology and services.

Typically, IT infrastructures are managed in silos -- making it difficult to map the infrastructure to specific business services. This disconnect between infrastructure management and business services limits the ability of IT organizations to address issues that can lead to service downtime or slowdowns.

"CA Service Availability assures reliable access to IT services by securing, automating and optimizing the entire IT infrastructure to meet changing business demands," said Alan Nugent, senior vice president and general manager of CA's Enterprise Systems Management business unit. "Customers can move toward fully automated operations by making modular investments at their own pace. CA Service Availability is unique in the breadth and depth of its best-in-class technologies, its open integration platform, and its best-practice process blueprints that accelerate time to value."

Delivering on CA's vision for Enterprise IT Management, CA Service Availability leverages CA's Integration Platform to unify and simplify the detection, analysis, and resolution of problems across the entire IT infrastructure -- including systems, networks, applications, databases, security and storage. This enables IT organizations to ensure reliable access to IT services by securing, automating, and optimizing the IT infrastructure to meet changing business demands.

"Few things have a more critical impact on our business than IT downtime," said Linda Reino, CIO for Universal Health Services (UHS). "As the demands of our business increase, so does the complexity of our distributed networks, systems, and applications. Our clinicians rely on 24x7 access to vital patient information. As a result, we are dedicated to the process required to unify, simplify, and secure our entire IT environment. CA Service Availability is critical to help UHS ensure the reliability of our infrastructure. We are pleased to have CA as a partner in this effort."

Based on open standards including SNMP, XML and SOAP, CA Service Availability offers a programmable API as well as partner-developed integrations. These capabilities ease integration efforts for third-party management solutions and offer customers the flexibility to implement the solution at their own pace. CA also is providing EITM Accelerators, built on industry best-practices that support this phased approach to implementation.

"At Austin Energy, we are focused on running IT as a business by optimally balancing the relationship between customer demand and IT supply," said Andres Carvallo, CIO at Austin Energy. "CA has been a strategic advisor in these efforts and has helped us effectively manage our infrastructure, asset portfolio, support and delivery processes. Its new Service Availability solution promises to further enhance our ability to tightly align IT with the business while managing risk and reducing costs."

CA Service Availability incorporates major enhancements to the Unicenter product family, including new correlation, systems and virtualization management capabilities in Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) and Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM). Benefits include:

•  Optimization

• Virtualization Support -- enables on-demand resource allocation across Linux, UNIX, and Windows platforms through support for virtualized, clustered and Grid environments.

• Common and Continuous Discovery -- maintains an up-to-the-minute catalog of IT assets and easily brings new systems under management by adding them to a management database (MDB) for enhanced control and security.

• Adaptive Configuration -- automatically determines a roving baseline for thresholds for critical components, generating alerts only when conditions deviate from normal behavior.

•   Automation

•  Advanced Event Correlation -- dramatically improved performance of the analytics facilitates analysis of network, system, application, database, security and storage event information to isolate root causes from multiple related events.

• Policy-based Notification -- creates alerts, using intelligent event filtering, that escalate only critical issues for IT management's attention and action. Simplifies and automates notification, sending alerts via IM, pager, text messaging, phone, email or wireless device.

• Service Aware -- embedded self-management capabilities enable proactive and automated trouble ticket processing with Unicenter Service Desk and help desks from third parties.

•   Integration

• Management Databases -- leverages the MDB in CA's Integration Platform to maintain IT asset status information gathered from CA and third party products. Associates assets with the business services they support, enabling the correlation of heterogeneous and cross-stack infrastructure events to determine business impact as well as the optimization of repair efforts.

• Command Center -- delivers a unified, correlated, and prioritized view of events from networks, systems, applications, databases, security and storage. Provides a single, customizable console with advanced visualization so that relevant information is shown in context and non-critical information is filtered out.

• Improved Third-Party Integration -- through CA's Integration Platform, enables customers and partners to leverage their existing investments by simplifying and accelerating integration with third-party management tools.

"For organizations to move forward along the path to IT management maturity, it is clear that they need to model best practices relating to their people, processes, and technology," said Keith Halbert, CIO of EDS. "We have been impressed with CA's overall vision for enterprise IT management, and have confidence that its Service Availability solution provides the critical tools needed to improve IT service."