CA announced the availability of its heterogeneous, platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments - Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) 11.1. Unicenter ASM is a key element of CA's Virtual Platform Management solution, which helps organizations simplify the management of their physical, virtual and clustered server environments CA announced the availability of its heterogeneous, platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments – Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) 11.1.Unicenter ASM is a key element 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.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. The software also enables customers to leverage a wide range of virtualization technologies including Hewlett-Packard’s MC/Service Guard, IBM’s HACMP (High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing) and pSeries LPAR-capable eServers (P4 and P5), Microsoft’s Virtual Server and Cluster Server, Red Hat’s Advanced Server cluster, Sun’s enterprise and mid-Range servers, as well as Sun Cluster and Sun Fire servers, 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.”CA’s announcement of Unicenter ASM 11.1 joins a growing list of competitive offerings from companies such as Opsware, IBM, CiRBA and Egenera to name but a few. In 2007, this list of heterogeneous management solutions is expected to continue to grow. Software Development