Elastra Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise cloud management software, today unveiled plans for its flagship product and called for beta test participants for the Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server 2.0.

Elastra’s approach to cloud computing addresses many of the challenges faced by large IT organizations who are trying to determine how to embrace the public cloud computing model while, at the same time, automating IT service delivery in internal data centers and ensuring that both business needs and IT policies are met.

“Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server 2.0 is designed to seriously address the needs of enterprise IT to streamline the delivery of enterprise applications and services on public cloud environments, such as Amazon’s EC2, and private cloud computing platforms, including the industry’s leading platform for virtual private clouds, VMware Infrastructure,” said Kirill Sheynkman, President & CEO of Elastra. “Our goals were ambitious: build a product that seamlessly integrates application design, IT policy, and virtualization platform, and, not surprisingly, we had to innovate every step of the way. The tasks were challenging, but nine months later, we are ready to deliver the product to beta customers.”

Cloud computing has provided a flexible means to consume computing resources; however, IT organizations struggle with the lack of policy-based control and the manual processes required to architect, deploy and manage complete enterprise-grade application systems in these environments. In parallel, server virtualization technologies are being readily deployed to internal data centers to create internal clouds. IT operations needs the management tools required to leverage the potential of these new platforms and deliver applications as dynamic business services.

Elastra’s Enterprise Cloud Computing approach and enterprise cloud management software, combined with leading virtualization platforms such as VMware Infrastructure, help accelerate the end-to-end IT Service Delivery Life-Cycle:

• Application Architects rapidly compose enterprise applications that meet business requirements but are also inherently compliant with enterprise policies
• IT Operations Staff dynamically configure and control virtualized hardware and software resources in-house and efficiently manage the off-premise, outsourced resources as a seamless extension of the internal data center
• IT Operations Managers accelerate enterprise application delivery and improve control over process and change
• Data Center Architects are able to plan, manage, buy, and allocate compute resources in a centralized manner and create a virtual private cloud infrastructure that dynamically delivers capacity meeting aggregated demand
• IT Operations Senior Management are provided with fine-grained metering and tracking of software and hardware consumption to provide user-based charge-backs, ensure software licensing compliance and improve capacity planning and procurement
• Enterprise Architects are able to capture and enforce enterprise architecture policies and standards and make them readily consumable, understandable, and realizable by the entire IT organization

The Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server 2.0 supports application portability and hybrid cloud architectures by enabling enterprise-class application designs to be deployed and managed seamlessly across a unified portfolio of internal and external cloud resources. The leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, is Elastra’s platform of choice for virtual private cloud environments due to its comprehensive management toolset, scalability and proven reliability.

“The VMware vCloud initiative extends the efficiencies seen in virtualized data centers to enable virtual private clouds that leverage both internal and external infrastructure resources. Through the vast ecosystem of vCloud service providers, users can deploy new and existing applications to the external cloud with the reliability they have come to expect from their internal data centers,” said Bogomil Balkansky, Vice President, Product Marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware. “We are pleased Elastra is our technology partner. They understand the application service delivery challenges large IT organizations face today and the need for enterprise-class private cloud infrastructure. VMware Infrastructure provides application vServices that automatically deliver the right levels of application availability, scalability, and security. These services, combined with Elastra’s ability to accelerate the process of delivering policy-based applications in the on- and off-premise VMware virtual private cloud environments, raise the bar on what enterprises should expect and receive from cloud computing.”

External cloud services can now be seamlessly integrated with internal, IT-managed clouds from the virtualization industry leader VMware. “The goal of cloud portability is not to write scripts that attempt in an arcane way to move applications from one public cloud to another. We think the right approach is to create software that understands the notion of unified cloud resources, both public and private, and integrates them into the design, allocation, and governance process of building applications that meet business objectives. That’s the real promise of cloud computing for Enterprise IT: become a responsive service delivery agent within your company by taking advantage of cloud computing but, importantly, stay true to your architectural standards and corporate policies,” said Sheynkman.

To learn more about the Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server 2.0 beta program, please go to www.elastra.com/products