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What is Plain Old Virtualization, Anyway? Not Cloud, That's What.

Posted by Justin Nemmers

5/6/13 3:57 PM

it organization underwater overloaded

I speak with a lot of customers. For the most part, many understand that virtualization is not actually “Cloud”, but rather an underpinning technology that makes cloud (at least in terms of IaaS and PaaS) possible. There are many things that a heavily virtualized environment needs in order to become cloud, but one thing is for certain: “Plain Old Virtualization” needs to learn a lot of new tricks in order to effectively solve the issues facing today’s IT organizations.

Many of those same organizations find themselves constantly underwater when it comes to the expectations from the business they’re tasked with supporting. The business wants X, the IT organization has X-Y resources. Cloud is an important tool that will help narrow this gap, but IT organizations need the right tools to make it happen.

Virtualization Alone is no Longer Sufficient

At plain old virtualization’s core is the virtualization manager. Whether it’s vCenter or XenServer, or some other tool, plain old virtualization lacks the necessary extensibility to get organizations to cloud. Even virtualization managers that have added some capabilities like a self-service portal or metered usage accounting are fundamentally just a hypervisor manager, and typically they only focus on their own virtualization technology.

Plain old virtualization doesn’t understand your business, either. It is devoid of any notion of user or group resource ownership, and lacks the flexibility needed to layer in the organizational structure into the IT environment. Instead of presenting various IT consumption options, plain old virtualization tells an organization how it needs to consume IT—in other words, IT Administrators have to get involved, chargeback isn’t possible, and the technology has little if any understanding of organizational or business structure. 

Plain old virtualization is a solved problem. The value proposition for virtualization is well understood, and accepted in nearly every cross-section of IT. Virtualization managers have matured to enable additional features like high availability, clustering, and live migration, which have allowed IT organizations to remove some unneeded complexity from their stacks.

Failings of Plain Old Virtualization Managers

Many vendors that offer perfectly good plain old virtualization managers are in a process of metamorphosis. They’re adjusting their products, acquiring other technologies, and generally updating and tweaking their virtualization managers so the vendors can claim they “enable cloud”. Whether the new capabilities are added as layered products that are components of a (much) larger solution suite, or merely folding those capabilities into an ever-expanding virtualization manager, the result is a virtualization manager that tries to be more than it is. The customer ultimately pays the price for that added complexity, and often, experiences increased vendor lock-in.

One of the many promises of cloud is that it frees IT organizations to make the most appropriate technology decisions for the business. This is where plain old virtualization that is trying to be cloud really gets an IT organization in trouble. Often, the capabilities presented by these solutions are not sufficient to solve actual IT issues, and the effort to migrate away from those choices is deemed too costly for IT organizations to effectively achieve without significant re-engineering or technology replacement.

CloudBolt Effectively Enables Cloud From Your Virtualization

The good news is that IT organizations don’t need to do entire reboots of existing tech in order to enable cloud in their environments. CloudBolt C2 works in conjunction with existing virtualization managers, allowing IT organizations to present resources to consumers in ways that make sense to both business and consumer alike. C2 does not require organizations to replace their existing virtualization managers; instead, it provides better management and a fully functional and interactive self-service portal so IT consumers can request servers and resources natively.

Flexibility in the management layer is critical, and one place where plain old virtualization tools fall down pretty regularly. C2 is a tool that effectively maps how your IT is consumed to how your business is organized. Try to avoid inflexible tools that offer your IT organization little choice now and even less going forward into the future.

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Topics: IT Challenges, Management, Virtualization, IT Organization

The 5 Cloud Management Vendor Categories: Where Does Your Vendor Fit?

Posted by John Menkart

4/8/13 3:51 PM

With Cloud Managers assuming such a critical role for IT groups, it is easy to understand why every existing IT vendor wants to supply a Cloud Manager that favors their core products in the roll out of an enterprise private/hybrid Cloud.

cloud manager chose wisely
Where does your Cloud Manager fit amonngst the available choices?

The Gartner Group has studied private/hybrid cloud management extensively and has summarized the space as having five (5) categories of vendors with ‘solutions’ for Cloud Management, as described by Gartner in their research note titled “Cloud Management Platform Vendor Landscape” Published 5 September 2012:

1) Traditional IT Operations Management Vendors

This segment of the Cloud Manager market includes vendors whose primary focus for management has been targeted at traditional physical and virtual infrastructures.  (BMC, HP SW, IBM, CA and others)

2) Infrastructure Stack Vendors

In this segment of the Cloud Management market are providers of the virtual infrastructure resources (Citrix Systems [Citrix], Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware) —the hypervisor and basic virtualization management. While some of these vendors offer some multiplatform (hypervisor or OS) capability, their expertise and deep integration are for their own platforms.

3) Fabric Based Infrastructure Vendors

Most hardware infrastructure vendors offer cloud management software, which enables them to sell private and hybrid cloud solutions and not just the features and benefits of their hardware. (HP, IBM, Cisco, etc.). Think wholly contained racks of equipment that include storage, compute, network, and software, sold in pre-integrated chunks.

4) Open Source

These projects or vendors provide an open-source-based abstraction layer for resource management. They provide basic CMP functionality and generally provide a northbound API so that other vendors/independent software vendors (ISVs) can develop and build enriched CMP capabilities.

5) Best-of-Breed Point Solutions Vendors

The point solution Cloud Management vendors, which include mostly smaller Cloud Management companies, potentially are able to introduce innovation to the market. This is primarily because these vendors don't have legacy products that have to be integrated to build their solution.

 

Examining these categories some concerns about vendor motivations and the resulting limits placed on customers adopting some of these solutions arise.

The first three categories of vendors have a clear mission to maintain and advance the dependency that IT organizations have on their core technology.  A primary reason for adopting Cloud Management is enabling flexibility for future IT choices, yet selection of a Cloud Management solution from vendors in categories 1 through 3 have effect of restricting choice and flexibility for the customer due to biased technology support.

In order to gain full functionality from the offering, all the vendors in these three categories mandate use of a suite of software and/or hardware from the vendors’ own portfolio. These requirements will hamper the organization that adopts a Cloud Management solution.  Rather than being free over time to adopt new technologies like Network Virtualization, IT organizations will be limited to continuing to feed their ‘Cloud Management” vendor large sums of the IT budget for software and hardware, ensuring they are now ‘locked-in” as a result of a biased Cloud Management approach. These large vendors have a term for what they are trying to achieve with the customer. It’s ‘share of wallet’.  Any vendor looking for more share of your wallet is not going to make it easy or flexible for your enterprise to adopt products or technologies that they do not provide.

Gartner views the fourth category (open source) with promise noting: These solutions “provide basic Cloud Management functionality and generally provide a northbound API so that other vendors/independent software vendors (ISVs) can develop and build enriched CMP capabilities.”

The options in this category are tools like OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus.  The level of immaturity of the technologies in this space are the reason Gartner sees the need for an API so other more refined and mature Cloud Managers can abstract the users from these specific tools. By avoiding direct use of the cloud frameworks’ UI, the organization can use a more complete Cloud Manager to integrate the Cloud pilots undertaken with Open Source tools using only a broader cloud approach by the overall enterprise.

The additional concern with respect to these open source frameworks is that they are developed as a monolithic technology stack and bring unique technology such as server virtualization and configuration management. Rather than being truly vendor and technology agnostic, they represent a considerable integration effort and encourage costly rip and replace.

So that leaves only one category of Cloud Management vendor that doesn’t approach the IT organizations’ problem as an opportunity to ‘lock-in’ the customer, or is not too immature to deliver organizational value today.

The “Point Solutions” category is one where real unbiased solutions will be able to emerge. Like CloudBolt, other vendors in this category must deliver value in their own right. The products must account for heterogeneous resources in an IT environment and must stand on their own when considered as a solution.

The range of vendors offering independent solutions for cloud management is extensive and the solutions are diverse. From products limited to organizations using only virtualization to full-on enterprise offerings like CloudBolt Command & Control (C2) that cohesively manage and coordinate hardware provisioning, virtual servers, virtual networking, configuration and automation (HPSA, Chef, Puppet, etc.).

I am sure I speak for all the point solutions vendors when I suggest that; “selection of a Cloud Management solution must be made with eyes wide open with respect to each vendors’ desired outcome. Increased “Share of Wallet” is not a technical objective.  Only when your Cloud Management vendor is fully aligned with your organizations will you be able to deliver to the enterprise the desired technical and business flexibility.”

Want to learn more about CloudBolt C2? Download our Product Overview! 

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Topics: Management, Cloud Manager, Gartner, John, Challenges, Vendors

Why Manual VM Provisioning Workflows Don't Work Anymore

Posted by Justin Nemmers

3/25/13 10:40 AM

Let’s look through a fictional situation that likely hits a little close to home.

An enterprise IT shop receives a developer request for a new server resource that is needed for testing. Unfortunately, the developer request doesn’t include all of the information needed to provision the server, so the IT administrator goes back to the developer, and has a discussion about the number of CPUs, and the amount of RAM and storage are needed. That email back-and-forth takes a day. Once that conversation is complete, the IT admin creates a ticket and begins the largely manual workflow of provisioning a server. First, the ticket is assigned to the storage team to create the required storage unit. The ticket is addressed in two days, and then passed on to the network team who ensures that the proper VLANs are created and accessible, and to assign IP addresses. The network team has been pretty busy, though, so their average turnaround is greater than four days. Then, the ticket is handed off back to the virtualization team, where the instance is provisioned, but not until two days later. Think it’s ready to hand off to the user yet?  Not yet.

manual provisioning, workflows, old-school assembly lineAn assembly-line model cannot deploy VMs as rapidly as needed. Automation is required.

The team that manages the virtual environment and creates the VMs is not responsible for installing software. The ticket is forwarded along to the software team, who, three days later, manually installs the needed software on that system, and verifies operation. The virtual server is still not ready to hand off to the developer, though!

You see, there’s also a security and compliance team as well, so the ticket gets handed off to those folks, who a few days later, run a bunch of scans and compliance tests. Now that the virtual resource is in it’s final configuration, it’s got to be ready, right?  Nope. It gets handed off to the configuration management team who then must thoroughly scan the system in order to create a configuration instance in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Finally, the instance is finally ready to be delivered to the developer that requested.

The tally is just shy of three full business weeks. What has the developer been doing in the meantime?  Probably not working to his or her full capacity.

Circumventing IT Completely with Shadow IT

Or, maybe that developer got tired of waiting, and after two days went around the entire IT team and ordered an instance from AWS that took five minutes to provision. The developer was so excited about getting a resource that quickly that they bragged to the fellow developers, who in turn start to use AWS.

Negative Effects on IT and the Business

Either way, this is a scenario that plays out repeatedly, and I’m amazed at how frequently it plays out just like this. The result might initially appear to just be some shadow IT, or maybe some VM sprawl from unused deployed instances, however, the potential damage to both the IT organization and the business is far greater.

First, users frequently circumventing the IT organization looks bad. These are actions that question the IT organization’s ability to effectively serve the business, and thus strike at the very heart of the IT group’s relevance.

Furthermore, the IT Consumers are the business. Ensuring that users have access to resources in near-real time should be a goal of every IT org, but rapidly adjusting and transforming the IT teams and processes doesn’t work as quickly as demand changes. This means that the IT org cannot respond with enough agility to continually satisfy the business needs, which in turn potentially means more money is spent to provide less benefit, or even worse, the business misses out on key opportunities.

IT shops need to move beyond simple virtualization and virtualization management. Why? Improved virtualization management does not solve all of the problems presented in the scenario above, while (and this is key here) also providing for continued growth. Implementing tools that only manage virtualization only solve part of the problem, because they are unable to properly unify the provisioning process around software (by going beyond plain template libraries with tools like HPSA, Puppet or Chef), and other external mechanisms (like a CMDB). In order to fully modernize and adapt existing processes and teams to a cloud/service oriented business model, all aspects of the provisioning process must be automated. It’s the only way an IT organization can hope to stay responsive enough, and avoid being locked into one particular solution, such as a single-vendor approach to virtualization. A well-designed and implemented Cloud Manager will give an IT org the freedom to choose the best underlying technology for the job, without regard for how it will be presented to the end user.

Either way you look at it, IT organizations need a solution which will allow them to utilize as much of their existing assets as possible while still providing the governance, security, and serviceability needed to ensure the company’s data and services are well secured and properly supported.

The Solution

Thankfully, there’s just such a Cloud Manager. CloudBolt C2 is built by a team with decades of combined experience in the systems management space, and was created from the beginning to solve this exact problem. Because we started from the first line of code to solve this entire problem, we call ourselves the next-generation cloud manager, but out customers call it a game changer. Give it a download and effortless install today, and we’ll show you that CloudBolt C2 mean business.

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Topics: Customer, IT Challenges, Management, Virtualization, Cloud Manager, Shadow IT, Agility

Build private cloud on top of virtualized network

Posted by Justin Nemmers

3/18/13 11:40 AM

Let’s face it. Networks are a pain to implement, maintain, and debug. Additionally, they’re often viewed as fragile enough that many teams generally wish to avoid routinely poking at them by messing with configurations or frequently creating/deleting VLANs.

Implementing a flexible and scalable private cloud environment on an inflexible network will only serve to reduce the flexibility and scalability of a private cloud environment that needs to grow.  In addition, ongoing management of these environments can quickly become difficult when administrators don’t have the ability to easily restrict network access by group, or have the ability to rapidly create new stand-alone networks for a specific application, group, or requirement.

virtualized networking separates logical from physical
Separate the logical from the phisical network.  Network virtualization does for networks what server virtualziation did for servers. You can't talk virtualization management without also talking about network virtualization management.

Enter network virtualization!  When implemented in your environment, and made consumable by a Cloud Manager, network virtualization suddenly breaks the network stack wide open.  In fact, I’d argue that until you virtualize the network, even private cloud alone is only partly useful.  Why?  Well, for several reasons:

  • Private clouds alone are limited by their ability to meet capacity demands. 
  • Eventually, that private cloud will run out of data center space, or will need to otherwise expand out of it’s shell. 
  • Whether your private cloud is fully on-prem, or you’re using a virtual private cloud model from someone like Amazon Web Services (AWS), the inflexibility of unifying that networking layer can be a difficult hurdle to surmount. 

Let’s expand on this AWS example.  Amazon offers a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that is essentially a private cloud hosted in the public cloud. Confused yet?  Don’t be. AWS uses advanced network and security parameters to effectively cordon off your cloud-based VMs from other tenants, allowing for secure communication and private networking in your hosted private cloud. They do this by manipulating the network layers in the hypervisors. AWS’ use of networking, although advanced, has its limitations, though. For instance, although VPCs can span availability zones, separate regions may require separate VPC definitions, leaving the networking integration to the user. In those cases, your local facility will have to implement it’s own routes to properly send traffic to the correct VPC. Although you can certainly work through those limitations, a hosted private cloud like that is wholly dependent on AWS. 

It doesn’t get any easier when your private cloud is completely on-prem. Be it demand growth, or a shift in requirements or priorities, networking is likely to be one of the significant bottlenecks in the growth and success of your private cloud.  

This is why a technology like network virtualization is so important. Implementing network virtualization in a private cloud environment (be it greenfield, or layered into an existing brownfield environment) allows you to approach new requirements with flexibility in mind and little concern over the networking infrastructure. Just make sure that your underlying network has the Layer 2 capacity for required traffic, and then start to build your environment above that.

In order to attain the flexibility of network virtualization on top of your private cloud, you need effective management. This goes beyond creating a handful of networks and handing them over to users.  Understanding what networks are required by which users and groups, and then ensuring that access is properly controlled is more than critical: it’s a requirement that must be met, or the network will remain a significant impedance to growth. Especially when it is time to expand the reach of your private cloud—whether that be adding capacity, layering in additional technologies, or perhaps looking to securely and safely make use of public cloud resources (congrats, you now have a hybrid cloud!)—Management of the entire stack is an imperative part of the solution. Deploy applications, resources, and networks all in one pass, no matter the environment. That’s the promise of network virtualization. CloudBolt makes it usable.

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Topics: Network Virtualization, Software Defined Network, Management, Implementation, AWS

CloudBolt Releases C2 v3.6.0

Posted by Justin Nemmers

2/14/13 3:31 PM

We're happy to announce the release of CloudBolt C2 v3.6.0!

Building on the ground-breaking Network Virtualization capabilites we released in v3.5.0, we've created the ability to directly manage network virtualization-provided layer 3 networking (i.e. routing) directly from C2.

C2 also now supports KVM-QEMU, further expanding the supported virtualization platforms that it centrally manages.

We've also added many more visual cues throught the user interface. You'll now see appropriate vendor icons for items including resource handlers like VMware vSphere and vCenter, AWS and QEMU, as well as Operating Systems, Configuration Management systems (Puppet, Chef, HP Server Automation), and Network Virtualization (Nicira by VMware).

Do you have a large number of users, but don't want to connect C2 to LDAP or Active Directory? Not a problem anymore, as C2 can now import users from a csv file.

From the beginning, CloudBolt enables plain old virtualzation environments to provide resources in a Cloud-ified manner: virtualization becomes Infrastructure as a Service and Platfform as a Service.  Strating with v3.6.0, we enable users to request multiple servers from multiple environments.  Previously, they could request multiple servers, but only from on envronment at a time.

We've also invested a bunch of time in performance tuning the UI, including adding capabilities to filter the server list by the OS family a server belongs to.

C2 can also now query a Configuration Management system to determine which virtual machines in your environment are also managed by a supported CM system so that C2 can enable more fine-grained application and life-cycle management of those VMs.

Ready to upgrade?  Hit up our support portal (login required) for details.  Want to kick the tires?  Request a download now!

Download C2

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Topics: Nicira, Network Virtualization, Feature, Management, Virtualization, VMware, Cloud Manager, Upgrade, Release Notes

Cloud Management, Vendor Impact of Software Licensing For the Cloud

Posted by Justin Nemmers

1/29/13 4:19 PM

I provided some background into how cloud models—be they public or private—break both traditional software licensing models, but in some cases, the software licenses themselves.  Despite the growing pervasiveness of cloud-based compute, I was amazed that there are not just cloud-incompatible license agreements, but also some licenses actually prohibit the running of certain software in the cloud.

There’s a term that’s applicable here: BYOSL (Bring Your Own Software License).  Vendors who understand a cloud-centric IT model understand that you need to be able to use their software in cloud-centric models if that’s what your organization wants to do.  However, many large vendors (it won’t be hard to find which ones I’m talking about here) take specific steps to limit BYOSL (just to name a few I came across):

  • Require specific understanding of underlying hardware architectures or processor specifications
  • Require licensing based on the physical, not virtual host
  • Mandate customers run vendor-provided license tracking, further complicating multi-location or multi-environment installations
  • Prohibit software from being virtualized
  • Force purchase of higher-cost public cloud resources which rope in the underlying OS license regardless of customer license availability
  • Force purchase of “License Mobility” options in order to run software in public clouds

In short, software license management in the cloud is a mess.  What’s really odd is that those large vendors also claim to know about cloud.  My resulting questions to you are simple:

  • Are you relying on cloud strategy from a company that actively uses their software licensing to discourage or prevent you from moving to a more open cloud-centric IT model?
  •  Are they leveraging their licenses to force you down the path they want you to?

My subtext:  If you’re listening to intently to those large vendors, the answer to both is “yes”.  Proceed with caution if your primary cloud strategy comes from your hardware, middleware, database, or even OS vendor.

license management and cloud
Be sure to get the full story from vendors and how software licenses will work in the cloud.

In some cases, I can understand why these companies believe that licensing software based on the type of physical CPU, or the count of virtual CPUs, or even the type of cloud the application is running in.  However, more often than not, vendors are just trying to protect market share or revenue.  In other situations, perhaps there are other requirements, such as performance, or hardware that present troubles when run virtualized.  But that’s a support issue, not a licensing one.  Otherwise, their restrictions make little sense.

Vendor licenses that restrict where purchased software can and cannot run are incompatible with the current trajectory of IT.  Vendors need to understand that there is little fundamental difference between applications running on an Amazon EC2 instance in Virginia vs. a Google Compute instance in California, vs. a Rackspace instance in Texas vs. your own VMware-based vCenter cluster in your data center.  

Cloud management can help to solve this problem, too.  If software vendors are concerned about protecting revenue, they have no impetus to alter a license model in a way that will save customers money but be totally untraceable.  IT is absolutely heading toward usage-based accounting and costing of license usage, but currently, vendors possess no reliable way to effectively track that usage.  Cloud complicates that for them.  A vendor-agnostic tool that delivers accurate license usage counts in real-time ensures IT organizations remain compliant, and gives software vendors a little peace that they’re not missing out on revenue, but also provides IT organizations the tool necessary to much more effectively utilize software licenses. 

And for those software vendors that are behind the times?  They must adapt, or they’ll be (or rather, continue to be) pummeled out of existence.

 Get C2 Product Overview

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Topics: Public Cloud, IT Challenges, Management, Cloud Management, License Management

VMware Lab Manager is going away and CloudBolt C2 can take over.

Posted by Justin Nemmers

1/24/13 6:11 PM

I happened to catch Brandon Butler’s article talking about the replacement choices customers have now that VMware’s Lab Manager product is being discontinued.  There has been no shortage of vendors to quickly put their hands up with claims such as “no net new costs” or offering new cloud service provider options to help those customers move to something new and better.  Some of these solutions still require you to upgrade from vCenter 4 to 5.  Others are overly complicated, or require you to use something different than vCenter-based virtualization altogether.

VMware Lab Manager discontinued
Your Lab Manager installation will be far less functional (or colorful) in a few months.

Beyond self-service provisioning, this is a great opportunity for a VMware Lab Manager customer to extend their capabilities while:

  • requiring a minimum of both effort and changes to their process
  • allowing the organization the option of utilizing public cloud resources 

Too good to be true?  Hardly!

For starters, CloudBolt Command and Control (C2) is amazingly easy to install and configure.  Download the virtual appliance, import it into your vCenter cluster (it even works on version 4!), and you’re off to the races.  With most installation and configurations taking less than 20 minutes, CloudBolt C2 can start deploying instances in your vCenter environment almost immediately.  Not only can your users easily provision their resources using CloudBolt C2’s self service interface, but you’ll get the easy ability to seamlessly use public cloud resources, if desired. 

CloudBolt C2 is much more capable than that, too…  but I’ll save the best for last after a recap, of course…

  • You have VMware Lab Manager
  • You have vCenter
  • You need to rapidly and repeatedly provision instances

Of course, CloudBolt C2 do all of that, but we’ve got a special treat.  CloudBolt C2 Virtualization Edition is free to use for up to 100 managed VMs.  I’m not even saying no net new cost.  I’m saying no cost.  How’s that for an option? 

Get C2 Product Overview
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Topics: Management, Consumability, VMware, IT Organization, People

One cloud manager to rule them all!

Posted by Justin Nemmers

11/12/12 9:40 AM

When I first started at Red Hat, I was a consultant who helped customers deploy a relatively wide set of technologies. A common delivery that we performed frequently was to install and configure the Red Hat Network Satellite Server, which did a phenomenal job of deploying and managing its namesake: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Managing resources is fundamental to operations in a data center, and within a short time, a new breed of management tools started to materialize. These tools promised—and many delivered—one tool with a single-pane-of-glass actionable management of every server resource in a business datacenter, as long as you only tried to use it for the products those tools managed, that is.

The technologist in me was instantly skeptical of single tool products. As I saw it, the problem was more nuanced than “one tool to rule them all,” because most IT shops had more than just a single platform in play. Red Hat Network Satellite server could do things to and with RHEL systems that these other tools couldn’t touch, but it couldn’t do anything on Windows. In any case, why would you want that? You probably had Microsoft System Center to handle your Windows. In fact, most major enterprise platforms have a powerful management tool built alongside it, and also have the ability to control even the smallest configuration. How can a “we-do-everything tool” ever hope to match the power already built into these products for management and configuration?

Rings to Rule the Cloud

It’s no different with cloud management platforms (CMP) - they run into the same walls, and don’t have the ability to talk to anything except their own product line. In order for a CMP to qualify as a true “one tool” management product, it has to talk to everything in the datacenter across physical and virtual platforms and cloud frameworks, and help you make use what you’ve already invested in, or it is just another tool that adds weight and costs to a datacenter. And, a “one tool” product shouldn’t require the replacement of expensive technologies or require a significant investment in time and money to install, use and maintain, either.

I would put my skepticism to rest if there was a tool that could give you situational awareness of your entire IT environment while still being able to use the deeper functionality of the native management utility in a manner that leverages rather than replaces your existing tools. This means “one tool” that can identify what is in use, talk to it, allow for full utilization of its capabilities and, perhaps even as icing on the cake, provide it to end-users. Furthermore, the approach must salvage the significant investment in acquisition, implementation, and training you’ve made in those other tools without ripping or replacing anything. Why should a company have to start over, or spend a huge amount of money to buy new stuff so they can use what they already own?

Do-it-all technologies may be very good at certain tasks, but most will fall down when it comes creating a resource management tool that works across the entirety of the resource pool and cloud frameworks, uses existing assets and doesn’t require any significant amount of time or money to implement. At CloudBolt, we’ve focused all of our efforts on a full-on solution for the problems virtualized environments face with a product that can evolve with a company as it makes changes in IT, even as it solves the challenges of right now across multiple platforms and cloud frameworks. Our development team, under the leadership of our CTO Bernard Sanders, and lead product architect Auggy Da Rocha, struck out to create a “one tool” resource management product that can truly rule them all by solving all of those problems, and making maximum use of the capabilities of existing IT as it deploys a private cloud with hybrid cloud functionality. A huge part of my job here is to make sure our customers are getting solutions that provide them with full enterprise situational awareness as well as interoperability with existing management tools. CloudBolt C2 is one tool to rule them all, and it can truly revolutionize how organizations work with, and use their IT.

An affordable tool that builds on top of what you’re already doing, C2 makes what you’ve got visible and presents it as cloud, so your IT shop gains the ability to unify management across a wide variety of technologies in a way which allows for the easy presentation of any IT resource to end users. Because those users are fully abstracted from the underlying technology, you’re suddenly able to choose and configure the best underlying technology combination possible. Not only do you gain agility in serving end users, you also gain flexibility in your choice of technology, and that turns into the ability to drive down costs on things like VM sprawl. Plus, it decreases possible attack vectors.

By leveraging the existing technologies already in your environment, CloudBolt C2 allows IT shops to realize the full value and potential of existing management and virtualization tools, and gives higher ups a much clearer, fully-transparent view into cross-environment utilization in ways that were absolutely impossible before. I could go on, but you get the idea. In short, using C2 as one tool to rule them all gives you the ability to unlock the true power of your entire IT environment in ways that will save you time, money, and ensure that you leave your end users smiling.

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Topics: IT Challenges, Management