Roundup: CA Tech, Riverbed, Brocade

Here’s a roundup of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

CA acquires Hyperformix, Nimsoft monitors vBlocks. CA Technologies (CA) announced a definitive agreement to buy Hyperformix, a leading provider of capacity management software for dynamic physical, virtual, and cloud IT infrastructures.  The acquisition will add to CA's virtualization management portfolio and complement existing virtualization, automation and assurance solutions.  "Capacity management is an important discipline for customers attempting to expand their virtualization and private cloud deployments,” said Peter Klante, President and CEO, Hyperformix. "As a virtualization rollout progresses through the enterprise, insight and comprehensive planning are required to realize its potential. CA Technologies and Hyperformix will deliver on that critical need."

Nimsoft, a CA company also recently announced the addition of complete monitoring for private cloud. Vblock infrastructure packages to the Nimsoft unified monitoring architecture. This will allow end-to-end performance and availability monitoring of network, storage, compute and application layers.  “By delivering a complete, integrated technology stack, the Vblock infrastructure is sure to gain increased market adoption," said Dennis Callaghan, The451Group, senior analyst, Enterprise Software. "Once deployed, an organization’s ability to monitor Vblock performance will play a critical role in the degree to which it is able to realize the value of its investment."

Riverbed and McAfee expand partnership.  McAfee (MFE) and Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced an expansion of their partnership to now deliver Web 2.0 security capabilities on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP). The partnership combines the McAfee Web Gateway with the Riverbed Steelhead appliance to deliver proactive Web 2.0 protection from headquarters to branch offices.  Customers can deploy virtualized applications, such as McAfee Web Gateway Security, directly on the RSP to further minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office, thereby reducing operational overhead.  "By running McAfee Web Gateway security on the RSP, enterprises experience these benefits along with the ability to proactively protect themselves against the threats that attack systems via social media and other Web 2.0 applications," said Venugopal Pai, vice president of global alliances at Riverbed.

Brocade supports 16 Gbps standard. Brocade (BRCD) announced its support of the next generation of Fibre Channel (FC) industry standard, FC-PI-5, which will offer 16 gigabits per second (Gbps) performance.  With Brocade solutions accounting for 67.5 percent of the FC switch and director market, Brocade's endorsement is key, and the 16 Gbps standard will be critical to scaling new virtualized workloads based on its proven performance, reliability and simplicity.  "Brocade serves as the Chair of the INCITS TC T11 committee and is committed to providing standards-based technologies. With the introduction of the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard, we are effectively future-proofing the data center to enable hyper-scale virtualization for emerging workloads and private storage clouds, while protecting billions of dollars in existing infrastructure investments," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of data center products at Brocade.  According to a study from TheInfoPro, fiber channel is the most popular attachment choice for the virtualized data center, with most end users indicating that over 75 percent of new virtual machines will be attached to FC storage.