CA buys further into cloud with Hyperformix

CA Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to buy Hyperformix, a privately held provider of capacity management software for dynamic physical, virtual and cloud IT infrastructures.

Terms of the deal, which CA said will help it target enterprise virtual environment cloud migrations, were not disclosed.

The company explained that Hyperformix's specialisation in the discovery of physical and virtual hardware, software, storage and network resources will help address virtual machine "sprawl and stall".

'Virtual machine sprawl' refers to virtualisation deployments that are allowed to grow in an uncontrolled way, according to CA, whereas 'virtual machine stall' is the inability to move beyond initial virtualisation of 20 to 30 per cent of servers.

"An important aspect of CA's virtualisation and cloud strategies is to help customers overcome the 'virtual machine stall' challenges as they roll out virtualisation, and progress to a dynamic, cloud-based datacentre architecture, " said Roger Pilc, general manager of CA's virtualisation and automation customer solutions business.

The capabilities of Hyperformix's Capacity Manager, Data Manager and Performance Optimiser tools will help CA apply application performance and service level agreements in cloud environments by integrating with its existing virtualisation, automation and assurance solutions portfolio, the firm said.

Integration of Hyperformix will therefore deliver cost, agility and availability benefits to businesses through faster and more reliable datacentre consolidations, virtualisation rollouts, platform refreshes and application or private cloud migrations, according to CA.

Bob Tarzey, director of analyst firm Quocicrca, told V3.co.uk that CA's latest acquisition is probably a wise one, as it will help the company get into the rapidly evolving area of datacentre management.

"Workload management and a number of other areas are all considerations that the big four IT systems management vendors have not had to take into account before," he said.

"Juggling physical and virtual resources is also important, as virtualisation may be good for processing power and storage, but can be limited by bandwidth and I/O requirements."

The transaction and transfer of Hyperformix's 70 staff, along with its 200 existing customers, is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.