Surgient, the leading provider of IT service delivery and virtualization automation, today introduced
new features and enhancements to its Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The new version enables IT administrators to reduce capital and operating spend by 50 percent or more and gain greater control over virtualized and private cloud infrastructures. New functionality enables IT professionals to control license sprawl, break up large hosts among several virtual pools and allow integration with VMware vCenter.
Numerous companies have deployed the patented Surgient Platform to optimize the IT Service Delivery process through dynamic resource provisioning and heterogeneous infrastructure management. With Surgient’s unique Policy-Driven Self-Service™ model, IT administrators define critical policies and deliver virtual and physical computing resources to users in a fully self-service manner.
The platform can be used to create internal or private clouds of resources serving multiple organizations within the enterprise, simplifying service delivery and freeing up IT staff to focus on more strategic activities. Surgient recently announced that many of its customers have realized the benefits of using Surgient’s technology to create private clouds. IT departments rely on Surgient to build and centrally manage clouds of virtual and physical resources and optimize infrastructure, while providing users with self-service access to resources across the delivery cycle.
“IT organizations in the pursuit of quick cost optimization projects should look to shared pooling of their development and test server resources and implement self-service provisioning,” said Donna Scott, VP, distinguished analyst at Gartner. “This will not only cut costs through dynamic sharing of resources, but increase agility by shortening the time it takes to provision not just a server but a service as well as make scarce people resources more efficient.”
"Surgient has taken its virtualization expertise out of the test lab and into IT operations," said Rachel Chalmers, research director, Infrastructure Management, at The 451 Group. "Surgient was a pioneer in the virtual lab automation market, one of the earliest and most effective testbeds for applying virtualization to the strategic challenges facing IT. Now the company has extended those benefits to job roles outside the test lab, including the people responsible for supporting production IT infrastructure."
“Surgient’s solutions create more efficient IT departments by streamlining the delivery of IT services, and the newest release of our platform builds on that success by giving customers more control over their environments,” said Dave Malcolm, chief technology officer at Surgient. “Whether you call it virtualized infrastructure or a private cloud, the bottom line is that companies are evolving data centers into elastic computing environments that are flexible to business users’ needs without requiring significant administrative overhead.”
Among the enhancements to the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.1:
- Partial Host Pooling. Maximize resource utilization and minimize the need for additional hosts with the ability to divide large hosts (RAM, VMs, etc.) across different groups of users and different pools for more granular distribution of today’s larger hosts’ resources.
- License Sprawl Protection. Actively track and manage the number of licenses used within a private cloud or virtual pool to prevent resource sprawl, assuring license compliance and eliminating excess license costs.
- Third-Party Post Deployment Actions. Specify post-deployment actions to be executed directly within Surgient environments on deployed physical and virtual servers from Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution or HP Server Automation. Mainly used for patching and upgrading guest OSs, automating load test data, initiation of nightly builds, and other environment customizations, this enhancement allows the provisioning of configurations and other data center automation actions into deployed virtual pools or private clouds.
- Integration with VMware vCenter. Capitalize on broad functionality and existing investments in templates from VMware vCenter Server by importing and exporting them into the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with this new integration with vCenter.
- Support for VMware ESXi Hypervisor. Leverage a broad range of enterprise hypervisor technologies, including VMware ESXi, VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Customizable User Interface. Many Surgient customers create private clouds to demonstrate their software offerings to potential buyers. The new version provides functionality to embed company and product branding into the user interface, providing additional marketing benefit from the product.
Availability and Installation Options
Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.1 will be generally available April 30th. The Surgient Platform is offered as a hosted solution or licensed, onsite installation. Customers also have the option of implementing a hosted solution for rapid ramp-up prior to migrating to an on-premise platform. License pricing starts at $25,000.