Adaptive Computing announced it is upgrading its data center and cloud management system intended to automate the decisions and process of provisioning diverse resources, against diverse incoming workloads and changing conditions based on business policies and service level goals. The new solution, Moab Cloud Suite 7.1, provides on-demand user self-service resource requests for cloud environments with usage chargeback and an administrative dashboard.
The Moab Cloud Suite adds four elements intended to improve overall functionality and maximize intelligent cloud deployment and performance, Chad Harrington, vice president of marketing at Adaptive Computing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. These features include the introduction of a simplified dashboard, making it easier to reserve servers, image-based provisioning, and more efficient usage accounting for chargeback and overall insight into services consumed.
By creating simpler dashboards, Adaptive enables administrators to more easily develop and fine-tune their policies. The visual interface lets administrators see at a glance the information needed about each policy, and newly simplified controls show potential conflict between different policies. The dashboards include the most commonly needed policies.
In addition, for future projects or groups that require critical SLAs, administrators may need to create and manage guaranteed service reservations. Moab’s Create Reservation Manager makes it easier to handle the reservation process, and the new View Reservations dashboard provides a single place to view details for all current reservations.
Going beyond configuration-based templates, Moab Cloud Suite 7.1 also allows administrators to take advantage of VMware image templates for quicker provisioning. Administrators can create a new service template by importing images from VMware, or import it directly into the service workflow process, eliminating the need to store images in multiple places.
And finally, new accounting capabilities provide more efficient usage accounting with sample configurations to help determine the most effective accounting model, as well as the ability to automatically schedule and see notifications of accounting events. The charge rate table also includes more granular conditional usage rates, providing additional accounting flexibility for customers. And the ability to switch between different clusters in the interface improves overall accounting visibility. “We have seen private cloud projects fail because they did not implement chargeback or showback in the accounting functions,” says Harrington, noting that as a result of better accounting, people also tend to waste less, and use only what makes sense.
“Moab is a very powerful product and it does a lot to save money and increase productivity, but because it is powerful, it was a little harder to configure than it needed to be. This release is all about making it very simple to turn on the power that saves you money and time,” says Harrington. Moab Cloud Suite 7.1 will be released in July. For more information, visit www.adaptivecomputing.com.