CA Technologies Inc. has added new analytics capabilities to its CA Capacity Management tool to help service providers better predict the amount of resources need to support applications in on-premises, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.

The updated capacity management tool is aimed at reducing data center costs and risk, and improving organizational agility by basing its predictions on real-time configuration, performance, and utilization and calculating peak and average activity as well as mid- and long-term resource usage patterns, according to CA officials.

The tool includes algorithms to validate the quality and completeness of the imported data in order to provide visibility into the growth of IT workloads and how they might contend for resources in the future.

Also included in the new version of CA Capacity Management are the following:

• Modeling of mainframe capacity and what-if analyses.
• Previewing of application performance and associated costs analysis for hybrid cloud migration initiatives.
• The ability to reserve capacity for upcoming projects, application roll-outs, and users or end-clients being added to the environment.
• Expanded support for CA Infrastructure Management and Microsoft SCOM environments for greater data center efficiency, higher resource utilization rates, and more accurate application performance predictions.

“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,” said Torsten Volk, research director for systems management at Enterprise Management Associates. “It is essential for organizations to take advantage of a capacity planning and analysis tool, especially when deploying cloud solutions.

“The new enhancements in the latest release of CA Capacity Management are in-line with what my current field research is producing,” said Volk.

CA Capacity Management works on public cloud platforms from vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, Savvis and Verizon Terremark. It also supports virtualization platforms such as VMware, as well as hardware/OS environments, including Windows, and Linux on Intel or AMD, and z/OS on the mainframe.

“Virtualization and cloud computing have raised a variety of challenges for companies in managing the performance of business services,” said Stephen Miles, vice president for service assurance at CA. “They need to anticipate how their applications will perform in new environments, if they have adequate infrastructure capacity to deliver on their SLAs, when they will need to bring additional infrastructure on-line to support demand, and whether these services are being delivered as efficiently as possible.

“The new predictive analytics capabilities in CA Capacity Management provide the insight that help IT organizations ensure the delivery of high quality, reliable services while optimizing their investment in supporting infrastructure and freeing up investment for other innovative projects,” said Miles.