A few nights ago I was called by a London based investment house to talk about cloud management solutions and whether the space had potential. I have to admit my jaw dropped a little that any investment house specializing in technology companies would need to ask that question – all indications are that the future is going to involve the combining of multiple cloud infrastructure products – any tool that eases the management hassle involved in that has a great chance of commercial success.
I’ve spent a fair amount talking with enStratus founder George Reese about this area – he of all people understands the challenges and opportunities to be had. Which brings me on to the topic of today’s blog post, an announcement from IT management vendor Cloupia that they are release “Open Automation for Clouds” a tool set that aims to enable customers to extend data center management across on-premise and cloud resources.
According to their blurb, Cloupia helps organizations to evolve from static data center or virtual environments to private and public cloud environments in order to achieve the goals of elasticity, efficiency, cost savings and agility. In terms of the new product, the Open Automation for Clouds capability provides customers with a way to automatically add multiple infrastructure and cloud vendors as an extension of their data centers. Infrastructure administration tasks can be automated via the use of policies and repeatable actions that can be programmed into the tool.
Open Automation for Cloud doesn’t limit itself to automation however, it also serves up reports, analytics, workflows, triggers and chargeback functions to users – chargeback in particular is an important feature going forwards and enterprise IT departments struggle to find a workable approach to internal cost recovery for shared resources.
In a push to build market share, Cloupia is providing evaluation software, an SDK, documentation and training for partners and customers adopting Open Automation for Clouds. Open Automation for Clouds has limited availability.
