CA
Adds Sonor For Asset Management
Computer
Associates used its annual CA World event in Las Vegas to announce
Sonor, a new asset management product which incorporates business
intelligence about how the system is being used and substantial
automation, to permit many computing assets to be automatically
provisioned, directed, and managed.
Sonar observes and analyzes traffic on the network; it understands
more than 1,700 protocols and information sources. It builds asset
maps and keeps those maps updated as resource allocations change.
The
idea is to keep track of all an organization’s IT resources and
then assign, them, according to IT-determined priorities, to the
organization’s business processes.
In doing this, CA plans to go farther than its rivals
(although details as to exactly how this will occur are still
scarce). For example,
if the system needed an additional Linux processor to meet its
performance metrics, it could load Linux onto an idle Wintel
processor, run the task, and restore the processor to its original
state upon completion.
CA will incorporate Sonar across its family of managing on-demand
computing solutions. These
include BrightStor Process Automation Manager for provisioning
storage resources, eTrust Vulnerability Manager for monitoring for
security vulnerabilities, Unicenter for VMware Software, and
Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration for VMware.
These last two offerings support automatic reallocation of
resources in Windows and Linux environments.
Sonar is expected to be available in the second half of 2003;
pricing has not yet been announced.
These
products will, of course, compete in the marketplace with offerings
from Sun (N-1), IBM, HP, and Microsoft.
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