CA Unveils Broad Support for IBM Mainframe zIIP Specialty Engines


ISLANDIA, N.Y., Feb. 13 -- At the SHARE conference in Tampa, Fla., CA (NYSE:CA) today announced new releases of eight IT management solutions that evaluate, monitor and exploit IBM's System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) by taking full advantage of the zIIP's ability to offload selected computing tasks from a mainframe's general-purpose processors.

The CA solutions empower IT organizations to optimize application performance, to extend zIIP eligible workloads to include functions such as network packet analysis and data encryption, and to gain maximum business value from their existing data center investments.

"IBM's zIIP environment has tremendous potential benefits for IT departments that can take full advantage of its available processing power," said Chris Craddock, senior vice president and principal technology strategist in CA's Office of the CTO. "By delivering this latest round of zIIP-enabled solutions, CA is uniquely ensuring that customers enjoy these performance, scalability and cost benefits."

The CA solutions being unveiled today are:

Unicenter NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP can offload statistical analysis of packet flows by its Packet Analyzer component and the trace processing performed by its SmartTrace component to one or more zIIP engines.

BrightStor CA-Vtape Virtual Tape System can free up capacity on general purpose processors by offloading its processing to zIIP engines -- thereby reducing the cost of tape storage while adding greater scalability and reliability to Virtual Tape implementations.

BrightStor Tape Encryption embraces zIIP engines to reduce general processor capacity requirements, enabling customers to fully protect their growing volume of business-critical data by using existing hardware.

Unicenter NeuMICS Resource Management enables system administrators to quickly determine those workloads that will deliver maximum ROI through zIIP processor exploitation. It facilitates the resource analysis of zIIP environments and can forecast future requirements based on historical utilization trends.

Unicenter CA-SYSVIEW Realtime Performance Management monitors the use of general-purpose processors and zIIP, zAAP and IFA specialty engines from a single console, and its graphical analysis displays zIIP and zAAP utilization and eligible utilization. This information enables users to easily determine why eligible workloads may have executed on general purpose processors.

Unicenter CA-Insight Performance Monitor for DB2 UDB for z/OS provides greater visibility into DB2 performance on a zIIP processor and enhancements for the new DB2 9 will extend this capability.

Unicenter Detector for DB2 UDB for z/OS executes DB2 SQL statistics collection code on a zIIP processor for DB2 SQL activity that is running on a zIIP. This enables users to identify the applications that most significantly affect DB2 performance or consume the most resources so that they can be tuned effectively, when using distributed (DRDA) SQL queries from WebSphere, JDBC, SQLJ, ODBC, or other remote subsystem environments.

Unicenter Subsystem Analyzer for DB2 UDB for z/OS executes DB2 subsystem performance statistics collection code on a zIIP processor for DB2 activity that is running on a zIIP. This enables users to consolidate information in a clear, concise view for quicker understanding of the factors that affect DB2 subsystem performance, when using distributed (DRDA) activities from WebSphere, JDBC, SQLJ, ODBC, or other remote subsystem environments.

Additional CA Support for zIIP

Four of the product releases are available today and the other four will be available by June. Additional CA solutions, including the CA IDMS and CA DATACOM database management systems, will exploit zIIP over the next 12-18 months. CA announced its intent to support zIIP in January 2006.

"Most IT organizations are seeing computing workloads associated with their key applications, such as BI and transaction processing, grow at a much faster pace than their capital infrastructure budget," said Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies, an information strategies consulting firm. "By delivering new systems and storage management solutions that capitalize on the latest advancements in IBM mainframe platforms, such as the new zIIP engines, CA is helping its customers address the challenging economics of their workload and infrastructure growth."

About CA

CA (NYSE:CA), one of the world's largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., and serves customers in more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com/.

FCMN Contact: sambit.pattanayak@ca.com

Source: CA

CONTACT:

Michael Kornspan

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michael.kornspan@ca.com

Web site: http://ca.com/

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