PRODUCT SHEET: CA Infrastructure Management

CA Infrastructure Management
CA Infrastructure Management customers have seen as much as: 0% improvement 5 in MTTR 5% reduction 1 in monthly bandwidth costs 2.7% reduction in 3 network disruptions1

agility made possible

CA Infrastructure Management helps you deliver high performing IT services over your physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure through discovery, fault isolation, root cause analysis, configuration and change management, performance management, traffic analysis and predictive capacity planning.

Overview
IT interruptions cause business delays that can be detrimental to your productivity, quality of service and bottom line. CA Infrastructure Management is designed to help you manage the performance and availability of your service delivery infrastructure more efficientlywhether physical, virtual or cloud-based. The new heterogeneity that virtualization and cloud services insert into infrastructures ensures that IT management is no longer business as usual. IT, by sub-contracting its services, is losing direct control but is still responsible to the business for the overall quality of service. This seachange in the business of IT management cant be avoided if organizations are to remain competitive but it does require that IT organizations undergo a parallel transformation of IT service management to maintain service quality. Our management software makes it simpler for you to monitor voice/data network, server, and application performance and quickly detect service-impacting incidents across your infrastructure end-to-end. With centralized visibility and control of your underlying infrastructure and traffic composition, you can analyze traffic flows, pre-empt network and server issues, and better predict future capacity needs. Our service-aware and application-aware infrastructure management is one piece of a larger successful Service Assurance puzzle. The other chief pieces of the Service Assurance puzzle are CA Application Performance Management (CA APM) and CA Service Operations Insight (CA SOI). CA APM provides in-depth analysis of transactions to monitor application performance and insight into end-user experience. CA SOI enables you to discover and maintain IT and business service models, and correlates information from CA Infrastructure Management, CA APM and other CA Technologies and third-party IT management tools in real time, visualizing business services end-to-end and pinpointing sources of service impact and risk. All three help businesses improve service predictability and assure that critical applications remain running.
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IT Economics: CA Infrastructure Management Reduces Operational Costs and Increases IT Efficiency Sponsored by: CA. Mary Johnston Turner, July 2009.

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Benefits
Benefits of the CA Infrastructure Management solution include the ability to: Gain insight into whos using the network and systems, the genesis of performance degradations and which applications and cloud services are performing poorly Transform IT management from reactive to proactive with early notification of performance anomalies and infrastructure degradation Intelligently identify where investments should be directed to enhance network performance or application delivery Reduce costs by optimizing infrastructure assets and investment in cloud services Become a more agile organization, able to quickly respond to shifting business demands Demonstrate IT business value to executive and business stakeholders with extensive reporting and informed capacity planning

Business growth is welcome but the cost to expand your data center or build out a new data center is substantial. One major software and services company avoided the need to invest in a $6 million data center. The CA Technologies solutions help us make better use of our existing infrastructure and prevent unnecessary capital expenditure. In addition to optimizing their current infrastructure, capacity planning data enabled them to identify assets or networking links that were under-utilized, so they could change provisioning levels and save money.

Infrastructure management: not business as usual

As your organization grows and organizations sub-contract services to move towards a cloud model, infrastructure management becomes increasingly complex. The cost of day-to-day operations rises as well, stifling your ability to meet budgetary limitations and adopt new, strategic technologies: New strategies must be established to manage across the cloud Initial configuration and deployment of monitoring and management tools for the various network and system components can be expensive and require significant professional services The staff size needed to maintain these monitoring and management tools, particularly in dynamic, ever-changing environments, can easily exceed expectations
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The number of tools in use across all the management domains and the number of vendors providing them can rapidly grow out of control and present difficulties when trying to integrate the various data sources to achieve a centralized view CA Infrastructure Management simplifies IT management with cross-domain correlation (physical and virtual systems, data and voice networks, databases, client/server applications, private/public cloud) to visualize fault and performance information on a centralized enterprise dashboard. CA Infrastructure Management is service-aware, designed to provide visibility and control into the performance and availability of the heterogeneous service delivery infrastructure and all of the traffic it carries. The leverage of cross-domain information and service-awareness also enables performance and availability across outsourced services to be monitored and managed. With a centralized view of your infrastructure you are better able to pinpoint degradation and outages, regardless of where in the infrastructure it occurs. Service level agreements (SLAs) established with providers can be actively managed to maintain competitive performance levels.

Manage availability
iscover the D infrastructure, end-to-end solate faults rapidly I inpoint root cause P eliver change-aware D configuration management
Service-aware infrastructure management At the core of CA Infrastructure Management is functionality to model, monitor and manage relationships between the infrastructure, services and the users of those services, across physical, virtualized and cloud environments. By understanding the relationships between assets, configurations and events that affect a service, CA Infrastructure Management is able to identify the impact of service issues to the business and to users. Tight integration with other CA Technologies and third-party network management system tools creates a full service view. Fault isolation and root cause analysis Todays enterprises, government agencies and service providers need to reduce the effortand costrequired to manage their infrastructures. Reducing the time it takes to find network and system issues and reducing MTTR, by remediating issues quickly, is paramount. Incidents, particularly performance degradations without obvious cause, can take days and even weeks to find and fix. CA Infrastructure Management discovers the infrastructure, maps the relationships, detects and correlates events to suppress unnecessary alarms, automates root cause and impact analysis, and manages IP service technologies. The AutoDiscovery technology from CA Technologies is a compelling example of cost-saving automation. The resulting topology map presents clear and actionable information as root cause analysis pinpoints specific faults down to the individual port or circuit or other at-fault component. Across cloud services, fault isolation and root cause analysis has its place in assuring availability. By monitoring latency and relying on root cause analysis, you can determine if the root cause is within your area of control for fast remediation. If its in your providers area of control, having evidence of where the issue is occurring can facilitate an easier conversation and expedite the resolution. Ongoing SLA monitoring provides another metric for control.
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With 3,500 on campus students and 35,000 online students, quality IT services were mandatory for this large university. They were frustrated with their piecemeal approach that did not correlate events within a silo to tickets raised by students or staff. By deploying an integrated IT management solution from CA Technologies, they have transformed their IT operation from reactive to proactive, gained insight into the general health of their IT infrastructure and the ability to get to the root cause of a problem quickly. By fixing IT problems more quickly the university saves time and money.

CA Infrastructure Management deduces the root cause and visually pinpoints the single impacting device (in red), as well as other impacted devices (in gray).

Figure A.
A topology view showing root cause

Change-aware infrastructure management The benefits of configuration and change management are significant; with up to 80% of network problems attributable to poor configuration and change management you can greatly reduce costly downtime and troubleshooting effort. Some studies have indicated that network outages can cost enterprises as much as $100,000 per hour. CA Infrastructure Management gives you the tools needed to manage configuration changes: Capture, monitor, track and remediate configuration changes to thousands of network devices from virtually any vendor Correlation of outages to configuration change activity
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Configuration audit trail of any selected network device Policy enforcement on comparison of text blocks within host configuration files for greater control and visibility into how configuration changes impact your overall infrastructure availability Identification of a reference configuration to track drift and deviations, helping you to maintain compliance, with alarm on violations, if required Comparison of any two configurations, past and present, whether on the same device or different devices Change approval control Scheduling for change automation Reporting on the who, what and when of configuration changes Support for out-of-the-box Cisco IOS firmware uploads CA Infrastructure Management change-awareness is tightly integrated with its root cause and service impact analysis and with CA Service Desk Manager so that changes can be approved before being implemented.

Figure B.
Change-aware configuration management

Change-aware infrastructure management lets you compare details within the configuration file for differences that can represent configuration issues.

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Manage performance
Improve service quality with visibility into traffic flows and performance of the IT infrastructure IT services must be continuously available and operating at acceptable performance levels to support critical business processes. CA Infrastructure Management helps you improve service quality with visibility into performance of the IT infrastructure. CA Infrastructure Management collects traffic flow information and monitors and collects information from hundreds of network hardware vendors (covering thousands of devices), networking technologies, RFC standard/vendor-specific MIBs, and environmentals (energy, temperature, humidity, etc.), to enable a broad view of performance across the infrastructure. CA Infrastructure Management identifies and alerts you of developing bottlenecks, degradations, and impending failures and then documents the need for repair, reconfiguration, or capacity upgrades. Role-based reports help you to meet the needs of IT and business management, operations staff, administrators, engineers, and capacity planners. Performance management depends on a continuous flow of information from managed elementsresponse paths, routers, applications, etc.back to the performance engine. Cloud services may be instrumented differently and may not provide the accessibility to data that is expected, for example, a sample every 5 seconds. With CA Infrastructure Management you have the range of performance resources to work with the data you can receive from your provider, analyzing the kind of data they make available and on their time schedule. Additionally, you can measure response paths point to point and use the intelligent analytics, discussed in the next section, to notify you when thresholds are exceeded or when performance deviates from normal. Sophisticated performance reporting is at the heart of CA Infrastructure Management, which combines historical and real-time metrics with intelligent analysis to generate out-of-the-box, role-based views that are used to understand when, where, and how to avoid developing performance degradations before service quality is jeopardized. These reports provide a wide range of perspectives for triage and remediation and give IT the resources to quickly respond to rapidly changing business needs, enhancing their role as a partner to your business.

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Figure C.
A single view of performance

Monitor performance of transactions, interfaces, protocols, hosts, traffic flows, QoS classes and SLAs on a single dashboard for your enitre infrastructure.

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Proactive performance through intelligent analytics CA Infrastructure Management employs intelligent analytics to help you detect and respond to issues before users and services are impacted. The Time Over Threshold (TOT) algorithm compares the value of each key performance indicator (KPI) at each poll to a predefined threshold and reports if the value has been too wrong for too long. Instead of generating a trap each time the threshold is crossed, the algorithm determines the aggregate duration of violations within a monitoring window to filter out spikes and determine real, persistent problems. The Deviation from Normal (DFN) algorithm uses historical data to establish a baseline for what is normal behavior for your business. DFN monitors infrastructure component behavior (i.e., KPI values) within each monitoring window (e.g., hour of each day, day of week, etc.) and then assesses whether the current behavior deviates from that norm. The algorithm gradually adjusts normal thresholds, based on the rolling average over the previous six weeks, to reflect the dynamic, changing state of your business.

Figure D.
Intelligent analytics monitor performance

Normal behavior is deduced from historical data and adjusts to the changing state of your business.

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Understand traffic flows Drill down capabilities from high-level enterprise summaries into detailed flow forensics helps groups to identify problems and troubleshoot more efficiently. Designed to track 100% of flow traffic, CA Infrastructure Management can proactively identify malicious behavior with all IP conversations and allows you to set rate, volume and count thresholds based on flows, packets or bytes. Traffic analysis capabilities provide real-time visibility and behavior analysis of network traffic, illustrating how application traffic is impacting network performance. This helps identify the applications, hosts and conversations that consume the most resources allowing you to optimize the network infrastructure as well as proactively identify potential problems. It also helps identify the affected network links and servers so problems can be contained and repaired quickly.

A large airline was experiencing unexplained intermittent application performance issues across all of their applications and the network was suspected. Catching the performance issue using sniffers proved difficult, as the issue was too unpredictable. Solution: The airline utilized CA Technologies traffic analysis capabilities to gain full enterprise-wide visibility to what was utilizing their network bandwidth and was able to quickly pinpoint the problem: storms of anti-virus updates occurring across their network that consumed the majority of the bandwidth.

Figure E.
Analyze traffic on every link

CA Infrastructure Management shows network traffic composition so you can easily identify what comprises the traffic on each link. It is easy to identify if mission-critical applications are compromised by unnecessary application traffic.

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Proactively plan for capacity Capacity planning can help you avoid unnecessary WAN costs by right sizing your network links, meet future network requirements by link and application through trending analysis and solve performance problems faster with real-time identification of business and non-business applications and their users. To plan capacity you need to answer questions such as: Which applications are most heavily utilized in our regional offices? What is the total volume of traffic for our global operations? Does our new data center have the capacity to handle additional servers? Using historical data and trend analysis, CA Infrastructure Management provides the information needed to safely roll out new applications or add new users. Choose from reports such as: Network Utilization select the interfaces to include so that you can report on network traffic Application Distribution focus on the applications and protocols in use ToS Distribution identify the ToS categories for the most heavily utilized applications Server Activity identify the amount of traffic sent to and from particular servers

Manage new technologies

Virtualization, the converged data center and emerging cloud environments The ability to manage new technologies is critical in todays competitive and quickly shifting marketplace. CA Infrastructure Management fully applies its strength in availability and performance management across your infrastructure. Discover and model Sun Solaris Zone, IBM LPAR, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware environments and their associated virtual machines (VM) and virtual hierarchies, collecting performance and availability metrics that include hosts, VM resource pools, etc., for seamless integration with your physical environment and for an accurate topology of your entire infrastructure. A consistent use experience is maintained across the variety of virtual platforms and topology views are supported throughout. By providing centralized fault and performance management across physical and virtualized environments, you gain the visibility to confidently deploy production applications in virtualized environments. This can result in greater ROI and operational visibility. CA Infrastructure Management also supports todays converged data center environments. For example, CA Infrastructure Management supports Ciscos Unified Computing System, a core component of converged data centers and private cloud environments, by discovering and modeling UCS Service Profiles, the UCS chassis, blades, fabric interconnect switches, fiber channel and Ethernet interfaces, and environmental (power, current, voltage, temperature, etc.) components. It creates a topology of the UCS environment that allows the user to monitor both the logical association of UCS Service profiles and also visualize the underlying hardware components of the UCS system. The CA Infrastructure Management console allows rapid drill-down and locator searches, fully applying its root cause analysis and alarm correlation to the UCS environment.
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CA Infrastructure Management has recently added support for managing paths going over an MPLS provider cloud as part of its IP Routing Manager (IPRM) enhancements. This feature improves visualization of layer 3 topology and managed paths. In addition to providing unique insight to the teams responsible for IT transport, it also provides visibility into the health of the underlying network transport that delivers critical applications and transactions. This ability to link infrastructure to applications and align it to services illustrates our unique Service Assurance strategy.

Improve predictability and preserve investment through integration

Integration to improve service predictability Tight integration between our Service Assurance productsCA Infrastructure Management, CA APM and CA SOIcan improve the predictability of your business services. Your IT organization can be more proactive about critical application and infrastructure performance, getting ahead of trouble areas before they impact the end-user. When outages do occur you can shorten mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) via our root-cause analysis that pinpoints trouble spots quickly and efficiently. At the same time, you maintain real-time visibility into the experience of your end users and into the quality and risk to your business services. Third-party integrations to leverage existing investments CA Technologies has certified thousands of third-party IT components to ensure that CA Infrastructure Management preserves your investment in existing tools and maintains your freedom of choice. Universal workflow integration Gain performance management capabilities without having to learn a new product with integration that provides two-way communication with third-party management consoles such as HP OpenView Network Node Manager, IBM Netcool, and Cisco CIC. Operators of these third-party products gain a historical perspective of network performance with dynamic reporting. Universal data integration Meet the needs of service provider networks with integration that supports equipment from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, BrixWorx, and Psytechnics, for managing the performance of carrier-class switching environments. Through integration with Cisco IP Solution Center, configuration and performance information is obtained from Cisco VPNs based on Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) or the IPsec protocol. You can prioritize fixes, document adherence to SLAs, and report performance in VPN-oriented reports that distinguish between classes of service. Wireless data integration Designed for carrier-class cellular wireless networks (Nortel PDSN/ GGSN and Starent PDSN/GGSN), this integration gives CA Infrastructure Management the ability to gather the statistics needed to manage these industry-leading wireless voice and

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data gateways. Collect performance, configuration, utilization, and availability data from these platforms, correlate and analyze it, and generate reports with actionable information.

Deliver high quality infrastructure services

CA Infrastructure Management can help you: Increase visibility and control into the performance and availability of your heterogeneous service delivery infrastructure and all of the traffic it delivers Demonstrate value to the business by prioritizing incident remediation resources against the most important business service issues Make more informed investment decisions Confidently incorporate and manage new technologies, such as virtualization and cloud services Reduce the effort needed to manage your infrastructure Reduce the occurrence of network and system disruptions and reduce MTTR Become a more agile organization and take advantage of Cloud benefits

The CA Technologies advantage

CA Infrastructure Management delivers best-in-class infrastructure availability, configuration and performance management with extensive traffic analysis across diverse, multi-technology networks and systems to help assure the availability of your critical business applications. CA Infrastructure Management integrates with CA Technologies and numerous third-party performance, application and business service management solutions to help you realize the value of your investments across your infrastructure. CA Technologies unites professional, support, and education service elements under a single umbrella, providing your entire IT organization a seamless and fluid customer experience. CA Services gives you insight and control over technology and deployment efforts to help reduce risk and accelerate time-to-value. CA Education transfers information and insight to your staff to help maximize the value of your CA Technologies investment. CA Support focuses on your continuous success with trusted expert help and robust self-service tools.

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CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environmentsfrom mainframe and physical to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. Our 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 their evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at ca.com. CA Infrastructure Management delivers a more effective way to manage IT infrastructure, and it integrates with many of your existing investments in CA Technologies, third-party, or custom IT management tools. To learn more, and see how CA Technologies software solutions enable other organizations to improve service assurance, visit ca.com/infrastructure-management.

Copyright 2011 CA. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Hyper-V are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. IBM and Netcool are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill, or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. CS1718_0911