ISLANDIA, N.Y., October 4, 2010 -- Enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) are facing a major shift in IT as cloud computing innovation drives quicker and more efficient delivery of business services. To help companies get to the cloud fast, CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) offers a unique, revolutionary, application-centric approach with CA 3Tera® AppLogic®, its turnkey cloud computing platform. CA 3Tera AppLogic helps organizations increase business agility, reduce risks associated with cloud deployments, and enter new markets more quickly than previously possible. Version 2.9 of CA 3Tera AppLogic will be available this month.

"With cloud computing reshaping the way IT delivers services to business users, the perception of IT as a cost center is giving way to an appreciation of IT's true role as a powerful growth engine for the business," said Adam Famularo, general manager, Cloud Computing, CA Technologies. "Our customers are rolling out business services in a completely new way with CA 3Tera AppLogic and the click of a mouse – and as a result, they are gaining a competitive edge, attracting new customers, and improving IT economics and responsiveness."

CA 3Tera AppLogic Platform Improves How IT Delivers Business Services

CA 3Tera AppLogic is designed to empower customers to build cloud infrastructure in as little as four hours, and then pull from a catalog of reusable applications to rapidly compose, deploy and manage complex, online applications, significantly reducing time-to-market for new business services. Instead of provisioning expensive hardware infrastructure and relying on error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks, customers can create new applications by simply "dragging and dropping" components, without making a physical trip to the data center.

"CA 3Tera AppLogic has literally changed the way we do business – not just reducing the rote manual work, but also improving our flexibility, helping us create new services and control the cost of service for our customers," commented Jonathan Davis, CTO of DNS Europe. "Very quickly we have been able to ramp up new revenue streams and win new customers with even higher expectations and more complex needs." 

More than 80 companies are using this technology today, running over 400 public and private clouds on four continents. Several customers, including Cirrhus9, Contegix, DNS Europe, Kualo, Layered Tech and Radix Technologies, are now offering new on-demand services relying on CA 3Tera AppLogic for differentiated Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and virtual private data center offerings.

The CA 3Tera AppLogic platform uses commodity hardware to combine compute resources, storage, networking, high availability, security and policy management into a single system that is managed through one intuitive interface, something well understood in the mainframe world, but relatively unique to the way distributed systems operate today. 

With CA 3Tera AppLogic, enterprises can more easily move applications and their supporting infrastructure from development and test environments to full production, by dragging-and-dropping from one environment to another, eliminating the need to replicate configurations manually.  Customers also gain flexibility to better manage spikes in demand for existing applications by easily adding capacity or compute resources as needed, and they can quickly provision a private cloud environment from scratch.

"Cloud computing enables customers to share infrastructure resources and dynamically match IT costs to business requirements. In order to reap all of the benefits that cloud computing offers, IT professionals need to standardize, simplify and automate how they provision and manage end-to-end business services," said Mary Johnston Turner, research director at IDC.  "CA 3Tera AppLogic addresses this set of requirements by helping organizations to reduce operational complexity by automating rapid deployment of complex applications and associated infrastructure."

Key Features of CA 3Tera AppLogic

CA 3Tera AppLogic is designed to help MSPs and enterprises streamline the application configuration and deployment process with the creation of composite business services.  Each service contains the tools needed for the application to run, including infrastructure, configurations, software, code and data.  From a user-friendly interface, customers can then easily manage composite services as one object to start, stop, replicate, copy, backup, or even migrate the entire business service to a different data center for business continuity. 

New features planned in CA 3Tera AppLogic 2.9 include high availability for networking, increased IP flexibility and security, improved storage health monitoring, increased support for database replication, and full compatibility with previous versions of the platform.

This release is intended to be the next step in delivering on CA Technologies' vision for the Cloud-Connected Management Suite announced earlier this year. CA 3Tera AppLogic 2.9 product details are available here.
Additional features include:

Ability to Create Composite Business Services – Designed to manage the application and the associated infrastructure needed to deploy the application as a single unit – called a composite business service.  It quickly and repeatedly implements composite business services as needed, and optimizes the underlying storage, hardware, network configuration and resource allocation on behalf of the service. 

Rapid Implementation – Initial cloud installations can be achieved in as little as four hours, and new production services can be up and running in less than 30 days. Once installed on two or more x86 servers, customers have a private cloud environment to run new or existing applications.

Comprehensive High Availability – Provides high availability for the cloud system and all of the applications that run on it, including storage mirroring across multiple servers to help ensure that a server failure never results in data loss; high availability for networking (planned for 2.9) and the cloud controller; and replication features built into the catalog appliances. Users can run two identical instances of an application on the same environment, or in different data centers, providing a standby that is available to take on the user load, should the primary instance fail.

Network Security – Designed with a zero-trust security model, users visually define the network connections between all application components for each service.  The system is designed to enforce complete network traffic inspection, packet by packet on every connection, ensuring that if a network connection is not identified in the service definition, the packets are dropped.

Virtual SAN – As part of the cloud fabric, CA 3Tera AppLogic creates and manages a virtual IP SAN using the directly attached storage on the available servers.  It manages redundancy and failover without the complexity and cost to implement a traditional SAN. This allows application volumes to move with a workload around the cloud, or between clouds, automatically and securely.

Reusable Library of Services – Users can build a composite business service, configure it, and save it as a single entity in the expandable CA 3Tera AppLogic catalog for easy reuse later.  Customers can build applications once, and in mere seconds deploy a new copy.  This "build once, reuse many times" approach for standard, often-repeated deployments reduces redundancy and helps improve efficiency, giving customers more time to focus on strategic projects.

Cost Efficiency – Designed to be a cost-effective solution for enterprises and MSPs, enabling open source and standards.  Customers can reduce expenses on managing traditional hardware infrastructure and bring existing online applications to the cloud without code modifications.

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com.

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Source: CA Technologies