GlassHouse Technologies,
a global provider of vendor independent data center consulting and managed
services, today announced its Accelerated Cloud Enablement (ACE) service.
Based on GlassHouse’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, this service
addresses the escalating market demand for rapidly deployed, secure and
manageable private cloud environments that meet defined business
objectives.
For virtualized environments, the ACE service delivers
operational intelligence with a cloud management layer and includes:
•
Secure, personalized self-service automated
provisioning
•
Unified governance and control over virtual, physical and
public cloud resources
•
Intuitive user and administration portals
•
Service catalog with defined offerings and chargeback
capability
•
Intelligent workload placement
•
Defined policies
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Standard configurations
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Comprehensive reporting
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Integration with existing IT infrastructure
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Deployment, documentation and training
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Ongoing life-cycle management
“For IT organizations, deploying cloud hardware and software
is relatively easy, but enabling a true cloud environment that lives up to the
promise of defined services, simple user self-selection, and rapid, automated
provisioning is much more difficult. It is also part of the reason private
clouds have yet to be as widely deployed as predicted,” said Patrick Scannell,
President and CEO of GlassHouse Technologies. “IT
organizations eager to take advantage of the cost and flexibility benefits of
cloud services, and better meet end-user demands typically focus on hardware and
software and learn the hard way that success requires much more than deploying
technology alone. This service is designed to help enterprises overcome these
challenges and ensure that cloud initiatives meet business objectives.”
The ACE service allows enterprises to have a
fully-operational private cloud deployed within 45 days. This service is based
on DynamicOps’ Cloud Suite, and supports VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V
and Citrix XenServer. While the ACE service facilitates the rapid deployment
of a fully-operational cloud, it is also designed to be fully extensible and
scalable.
This service provides dramatic improvements in
time-to-cloud-value. While simple hardware and software cloud products can be
deployed quickly, a typical enterprise private cloud deployment can take six to
12 months. And without proper planning, service definitions, security and
governance requirements, many of these deployments fail to meet objectives.
Often the result is increased costs, failure to convince end users to adopt the
cloud services and without effective chargeback mechanisms in place, virtual
server sprawl escalates. ACE also addresses the common problem of cloud
vendors installing their hardware and software and then leaving IT to learn how
to manage and integrate users into the cloud environment. ACE ensures that the
cloud is designed and deployed to be effective, and also provides the option for
GlassHouse to manage the cloud environment for a six-month transition period, or
on an ongoing basis. Ongoing ACE management services include cloud-based
monitoring, incident management, administration, reporting and defined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) for availability and provisioning.
GlassHouse’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, also
including Cloud Impact Analysis, Cloud Modernization, and Accelerate cloud
services, have experienced tremendous market demand as enterprise IT
organizations grapple with the flood of cloud products that promise increased
service levels and reduced costs. These GlassHouse services also enable IT
organizations to become more of a service provider to end-users, creating
on-demand private cloud services while building an agile, easy-to-provision
infrastructure in an automated-delivery framework.