CA Capacity Management: Big Data Meets IT Infrastructure Planning

CA Technologies (CA) has updated CA Capacity Management, a solution that lets enterprises and IT service providers, including managed services providers (MSPs) optimize their computing infrastructures, both on-premise and in the cloud, to run at maximum efficiency without squandering resources or running out of capacity or degrading performance.

First some background on how the solution works. CA Capacity Management takes workload information already gathered by systems monitoring and management tools and models how those workloads would perform on different configurations of hardware or different infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace. Organizations can also plug in pricing information from various providers to get an idea of the best performing solution for the dollar. Such a tool could help MSPs plan for their own cloud services if they decide to ride the rails of some of the big, commodity-based cloud providers.  It could also help them choose the most cost-effective hardware and software solutions if they decide to become hosts themselves.

Managed service providers and other channel service providers have used the CA Capacity Management solution to help their customers optimize workloads, make decisions on hardware purchases and evaluate cloud providers, CA’s Jeremy Rossbach, principle product marketing manager at CA told MSPmentor. While the company wouldn’t name names, Rossbach (who brings years of experience in the data center space to his gig at CA) pointed us to some of the larger systems integrators with managed services offerings and emerging cloud practices, so you can fill in the blanks.

Much like some MSPs use tools to perform infrastructure assessments on potential customers and then provide recommendations for improvements, CA Capacity Management can be used in a similar way, enabling MSPs to create a plan for prospects to help them achieve greater efficiency. The CA Capacity management solution is a predictive analytics solution that can be run on an existing workstation.

Another use for the technology in today’s budget-minded corporate culture is hypervisor migration planning, Rossbach told me. As organizations look for more ways to cut costs, many are considering a migration to free hypervisors from fee-based solutions, he said. But it’s a mistake to blindly jump from one to another, and CA’s tool can help organizations foresee any issues and plan for them.

And, as previously mentioned, MSPs could use the technology to plan their own cloud services. The ability to use IaaS pricing information in the system lets MSPs comparison shop among the commodity providers.

CA Capacity Management provides information about platforms including public cloud vendors, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, Savvis and Verizon Terremark; virtualization platforms, such as VMware; and hardware/OS environments, including Windows, Linux on either Intel or AMD, and z/OS on the mainframe.

“Cost analysis is very important to customers in their cloud migration initiatives and it is very cool to be able to see utilization and cost levels when comparing cloud vendor platforms for migration efforts in the new release of CA Capacity Management,” said Torsten Volk, Research Director, Systems Management, Enterprise Management Associates, in  a prepared statement.