CA Unveils Storage-Management Software

Computer Associates has the experience and the products to play a major role in the storage-management software market. But two things have held CA back. The company has a long-standing reputation of bullying its customers. And the software vendor, with more than 2,000 products, hasn't made integration of its wares easy.

CA has improved its customer service, and Tuesday it unveiled multiple storage-management product enhancements to improve the integration of its storage software. CA believes that that high-end customers have four levels of storage, including data from a mainframe, from Unix and Windows servers in the data center, from servers on the LAN, and from desktop and mobile computers. Each has its own needs when it comes to storage management.

To support that view, CA unveiled BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5, a Web portal that acts as a console for storage administrators. This version is now tightly integrated with BrightStor ARCserve Backup version 9, BrightStor Storage Resource Manager, CA's eTrust Antivirus, and CA's Unicenter Network and Systems Management platform, and Unicenter Software Delivery. Enterprise Backup also will let administrators work with snapshot data-copying technology from EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, as well as archiving services from Iron Mountain.

CA's new products could let it serve as a key integration provider for processes such as backup and recovery across different platforms, says David Hill, an industry analyst at Aberdeen Group. In addition, most computer users don't give much thought to backing up desktop and mobile systems, so the task falls to the IT administrators. Aberdeen research shows that four out of five companies have some problem with backup and recovery. Says Hill, "This portal allows the IT organization to work more effectively."