eCloudManager 2.0 From Fluid Operations

Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, fluid Operations GmbH announced a breakthrough in the use of storage-assisted virtualization to drive IT efficiencies.

After the initial publishing of the VMFS technology in March 2009 and making it available with an open-source license, the market started to anticipate new private cloud management features that would become possible. With the release 2.0 of its flagship eCloudManager Product Suite, fluid Operations has now implemented the VMFS driver into its ready-made automation tool-set for immediate productive customer use. This announcement was made ahead of the upcoming VMworld virtualization show in San Francisco, August 31st to September 3rd, where the new features will be demonstrated publicly for the first time.

The fluidOps eCloudManager packages
a set of eCloud productivity tools to:

• manage the entire Enterprise Compute Cloud stack from hardware to software, including creating, monitoring and administrating of multi-system virtual application landscapes
• drive internal Landscape-as-a-Service (LaaS) offerings for IT system development, testing, production and training
• mitigate risks around system introductions, upgrades, migrations, consolidations

Customers, tasked with the challenge of driving compliance and automation through their IT resources, are looking to the eCloudManager to provide IT managers and teams control over their enterprise application landscapes, available resources, and ongoing SLA requirements. This new breed of practical, enterprise application management solution sits on top of existing hardware, storage and virtualization sources, and supports IT automation based on a unified semantics foundation.

"Many IT organizations have been hesitant to move mission critical applications to virtual or cloud-like infrastructures," said Cameron Haight, Research VP at Gartner. "These companies should look for tools that not only enable the assurance of high IT service quality to the owners of these key applications, but that can also help to lower the overall cost of ongoing (mission critical) application delivery and support."

One example of what has now become possible is to recover a virtual machine (VM) from a VMFS filer snapshot just by selecting the desired point in time and VM in a file system tree. Similar simplicity is available to provision terabytes of new enterprise VMs within minutes using eCM’s storage assisted cloning technology. Both tasks are fully integrated to the storage provider capabilities leveraging the available APIs, and no extra hardware, software or setup is needed.

fluid Operations is working closely with strategic partners, including SAP, VMware and GOPA ITC, to develop the software and deliver the eCloudManager to customers. Specific feature demonstrations and implementation packages will be highlighted at the upcoming VMworld in San Francisco in the New Innovator pavilion.