Maximize the Cloud with Adaptive Computing's Enhanced Cloud Management System

By Allison Boccamazzo, TMCnet Web Editor

This week, Adaptive Computing rolled out the red carpet for its all new, upgraded data center and cloud management system – Moab Cloud Suite 7.1 – developed to provide on-demand users self-service resources for cloud environments with the help of an administrative dashboard and automate the decisions and process of supplying diverse resources.

According to Chad Harrington, vice president of marketing at Adaptive, this new solution – which will be released next month – incorporates four elements specifically intended to improve the overall functionality of cloud performance, as well as maximize intelligent cloud deployment. These features include an all-new, simplified dashboard designed to reserve servers more easily, the introduction of image-based provisioning, more efficient usage accounting for chargeback and more advanced insight into consumed services.

Developing simpler dashboards enables the company’s administrators to develop and fine-tune their policies more easily, and the visual interface offers more comprehensive insight into information needed regarding each policy. Furthermore, newly simplified controls will display potential conflict between different policies and the dashboards incorporate the most commonly needed policies today.

If administrators need to create and manage guaranteed service reservations, for example, Moab’s Create Reservation Manager will make it easy for them to more simply handle the reservation process, and the latest View Reservations dashboard will work by providing a single place to view details for all current reservations.

“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,” adds Harrington.

The enhancements and benefits continue with the Moab Cloud Suite 7.1, which will also allow administrators to take full advantage of VMware image templates for faster and more efficient provisioning. They will then be able to create a new service template by importing images from VMware, or import it directly into the service workflow process, which will ultimately eliminate the need to store images in multiple places.

Other elements of this all new solution include new accounting capabilities, which will provide more efficient usage accounting with sample configurations with will help users determine which accounting model is most effective for them; a charge rate table including more granular conditional usage rates and added accounting flexibility; and the ability to switch between different clusters in the interface, which will improve overall accounting visibility.

“We have seen private cloud projects fail because they did not implement chargeback or showback in the accounting functions,” notes Harrington, who also added that individuals have wasted less as a result of better accounting, meaning they’re now only using what makes sense.

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