Abiquo, the leading Enterprise Cloud Management software provider, today announced that Abiquo 1.7, the fourth release of its flagship Cloud management software, will be generally available within 45 days. Abiquo 1.7 was designed to meet the advanced needs of large enterprises and global services providers. The release includes advanced Business Policy support that enables IT Cloud Administrators to set, edit and manage business policies from a single, centralized policy editor to ensure the business policies are automatically and consistently applied every time, without any user intervention. Other key features in this ground-breaking release include support for setting a broader range of resource limits at multiple physical and virtual levels, extended enterprise functionality and full branding support for service providers.
“Lack of governance is the number one reason Cloud implementations fail today,” said Dave Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, a strategic cloud computing consulting firm focused on moving enterprises and government agencies to the correct cloud computing solutions. “Abiquo’s advanced Business Policy support is one of the first Cloud management software solutions in the market to address the governance issue.”
Business Policy
Abiquo 1.7 advanced Business Policy support adds the control layer to allow organizations to build a truly scalable cloud infrastructure embracing private, public and hybrid models. As a result, organizations can now establish and automatically manage business policies across all globally deployed resources from a single pane of glass.
With other cloud management tools, so-called “policy” typically provides only fixed “best fit” or “first fit” allocation models. Other decisions are left to the operator, or worse still are not controllable at all, leading to potential governance, security and compliance failures, as well as poor utilization, and failure to achieve expected cost savings.
With Abiquo 1.7, organizations can allocate virtual resources based on multiple business and IT considerations including governance, security, compliance, affinity and cost - as well as a variety of utilization models. The business rules can be applied at multiple levels, and customized for individual physical datacenters, racks, servers and storage, as well as virtual enterprises and virtual datacenters.
“While Cloud computing offers a compelling value proposition, it has hitherto simply multiplied many of the management issues of today’s virtualized environments”, said Pete Malcolm, Abiquo CEO. “With Abiquo 1.7, we can not only resolve those issues for both the IT infrastructure and application groups, we can also ensure the needs of the business, such governance and cost control, are an integral part of the solution”.
Other Key Features Added to Abiquo 1.7
In addition to Business Policy, Abiquo 1.7 includes key features to support global deployment by multi-national enterprises and international service providers, including the ability to set a broader range of resource limits, which can be applied at physical datacenter, virtual enterprise, and virtual datacenter levels in any combination, giving total flexibility. In addition, Abiquo 1.7 now provides even deeper integration with VMware’s vMotion, DRS and HA functionality by, for example, automatically and seamlessly updating its own records to reflect movements initiated by VMware tools.
Finally, to support the growing demand for Abiquo as a global Cloud management platform for service providers, Abiquo 1.7 allows its highly regarded graphical user interface to be fully custom branded without any code changes.
For more information about Abiquo’s Business Policy keynote and other sessions at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley 2010, visit http://Cloudcomputingexpo.com/event/schedule. To see live demonstrations of Business Policy and Abiquo 1.7, visit the Abiquo booth (#200).