5/17/2010 -- At this week's CA World user confab in Las Vegas, Cisco Systems Inc. and CA Technology -- the former Computer Associates International Inc. -- trumpeted an expanded relationship that has CA delivering new versions of its data center management software for Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS).

CA says the new versions of its Service Assurance and Service Automation offerings will permit customers to manage UCS (along with other supported platforms) from a single-console view.

CA bills its Service Assurance and Service Automation offerings as tools designed to help IT organizations improve their insight and management of service-level compliance, as well as help IT professionals (or IT teams) diagnose problems and identify areas for potential improvement.

CA and Cisco announced UCS support in three additional CA offerings: Spectrum Automation Manager (CA's policy-based provisioning tool), eHealth Performance Manager (a tool for monitoring the health and availability of data center resources) and Spectrum Infrastructure Manager (a tool that assists with fault isolation and root cause analysis).

Cisco officials spin the announcement as a big endorsement for UCS.

To the extent that UCS garners support from vendors such as CA -- which, along with BMC Software Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), and IBM Corp., is one of the most recognizable brands in the system management space -- it invites comparison with entrenched hardware platforms, including rack and blade systems from HP and IBM.

"This integration provides CA…customers with the ability to manage the Cisco Unified Computing System from their familiar single pane of glass," said Ed Bugnion, vice president and CTO of Cisco's Server Access Virtualization Business Unit, in a statement. "The Cisco Unified Computing System and … [CA's] management solutions complement each other to help IT organizations reduce risk, increase IT agility and contain costs."

Since launching UCS 12 months ago, Cisco has worked tirelessly to establish -- and, more recently, to burnish -- its data center bona-fides. (http://www.tcpmag.com/news/article.asp?editorialsid=1525)

Its progress in this regard recently inspired Steven Schuchart, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., to observe that "[Cisco] continues to make strides in improving performance, scalability, interoperability, manageability and total cost of ownership in its [UCS] data center solutions portfolio."

Schuchart stressed that Cisco still had its work cut out for it, emphasizing a need to flesh out UCS with newer and more feature-rich offerings.

Cisco's partnership with CA seems consistent with that advice.
--By Stephen Swoyer