CA has announced Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) r11.1, a platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments -- enabling customers to continuously assess, manage and optimize system resources to ensure service availability and reliability.

Unicenter ASM automatically balances workloads in complex environments that include clusters and virtualized platforms. Through pre-defined business policies, it performs centralized dynamic resource brokering across virtualized server resources. If the performance of a mission-critical application begins to degrade and additional memory or CPU capacity is required, Unicenter ASM can automatically reallocate available resources to that application. Unicenter ASM can also make resources available by moving the least critical application on the virtual machines to a different server. If and when the demands of the mission-critical application diminish, Unicenter ASM will then automatically reallocate resources to other applications as necessary.

Unicenter ASM is a keystone product of CA's Virtual Platform Management solution, which helps organizations simplify the management of their physical, virtual and clustered server environments. It supports CA's EITM vision by unifying and simplifying the management of multi-vendor, heterogeneous virtual platform environments, and by improving service while reducing cost.

"Virtualization is enabling us to achieve great efficiency in our data center, but it has added a new level of complexity," said Andreas Becker, systems engineer, VHV Group, one of Germany's largest insurance firms. "CA's Unicenter ASM has enabled us to successfully cope with that complexity -- while also giving us the freedom to embrace whichever vendor's virtualization or clustering platform offers us the best value."

Unicenter ASM is compatible wide range of virtualization technology -- including HP MC Service Guard, IBM HACMP and pSeries LPAR-capable eServers (P4 and P5), Microsoft Virtual Server and Cluster, Red Hat Advanced Server cluster, Sun Enterprise and Mid-Range servers, as well as Sun Cluster and Sun Fire, Veritas Cluster Servers running Solaris and Windows, and VMware ESX/GSX Servers.

"As data center virtualization grows, enterprises will wind up with virtual environments that incorporate technology from multiple vendors," said Andi Mann, senior research analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "A truly vendor-neutral solution like Unicenter ASM will therefore become essential for keeping data center operations running smoothly."

Unicenter ASM automatically discovers virtual and clustered resources and creates intuitive visual "maps" of those resources. By enabling managers to define role-based control of these resources, it also enables organizations to streamline workflow and direct routine remedial functions to lower-cost staff, while limiting access to sensitive administrative functions required to maintain compliance.

In addition, by documenting how much capacity is available within a virtualized server environment, Unicenter ASM helps organizations make more informed capital expenditure decisions.

Additional features of Unicenter ASM include:

• Continuous discovery for up-to-the-minute detail about clusters and virtual resources.

• Complete out-of-the-box reporting on managed resources, including deviation of resources from their "desired state."

• Visual mapping of virtualized environments to accelerate problem identification and resolution.

Unicenter ASM shares information about virtual/clustered resources with CA and third-party management solutions, providing IT organizations with a "single version of the truth." It works with Unicenter NSM (Network and Systems Management) to provide a common user interface for all Unicenter components, greatly simplifying root-cause analysis and accelerating mean- time-to-repair (MTTR).

"To get the most out of their virtualized environments, IT organizations must apply consistent management to both their virtual and physical resources," said John Kane, senior vice president and product line manager at CA. "By intelligently automating these management tasks across hardware and software platforms, CA is uniquely able to help customers fulfill this critical data center requirement."