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Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management

Add a layer of abstraction and automation to your infrastructure to create a private, virtual private, public, or hybrid cloud environment.

Last Revised: October 24, 2012

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Your Challenge

  • For collocation and managed services providers, there has been a significant increase in demand to deliver Cloud (public, private, or virtual private) to enable customers to take advantage of the benefits of Cloud. Many organizations see significant value in getting all their XaaS’ from a single vendor, and this is leading service providers to invest in cloud management solutions.
  • Amazon has seen significant and widely recognized success in providing public cloud resources to the masses. Amazon’s storage cloud (S3) went from 262 billion to 762 billion objects stored in 2011 and, as a corollary, between 2010 and 2012, Info-Tech customers reported a 200% increase in IaaS deployments. The operational transparency and compute-on-demand capabilities are leading many to evaluate private cloud solutions.

 

Our Advice

Critical Insight
  • Solutions targeting service providers often have broader hypervisor support and chargeback capabilities, but less typically integrate with virtualization management software, such as VMware vSphere to capitalize on built-in functionality around live migration and dynamic automated movement of workloads.
  • Most solutions support VMware ESX and KVM, but few support Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer. As hybrid cloud scenarios become more commonplace, it will be important for service providers to select a solution that supports the install base of its clients. In addition, enterprise customers should look to solutions that can be layered on top of existing infrastructure, whether commodity servers, blade systems, or virtualized infrastructures with storage.
  • If there is a strong use case for public cloud integration for seasonal or project-based variation in requirements for resources, capability to integrate with Amazon using its APIs is a plus. This can allow organizations to manage public and private clouds from a single management interface.
Impact and Result
  • Understand what’s new in the Cloud Management market.
  • Evaluate Cloud Management vendors and products for your service provider or enterprise needs, using Info-Tech’s Cloud Management Vendor Landscape.
  • Determine which products are most appropriate for your particular use case and scenario.

Get to Action

  1. Evaluate leading Cloud Management vendors

    Arrive at a shortlist of vendors for further analysis.

  2. Create a customized list of the most suitable vendors

    Accelerate the selection process, and isolate vendors that best meet requirements.

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Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud

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Vendor Landscape: Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Options are proliferating as Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides a highly agile and low capital cost option for outsourcing IT infrastructure.

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Add a layer of abstraction and automation to your infrastructure to create a private, virtual private, public, or hybrid cloud environment.

Solution Road Map

Other Solution Sets in Server & Storage Virtualization

  1. Get the Most out of Server Virtualization
    Develop a strategy to move infrastructure from a virtual fantasy to a virtual reality.
  2. Vendor Landscape: Server Virtualization
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  3. Avoid Server Virtualization Implementation Pain
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  4. Leverage Server Virtualization for DR Affordability and Agility
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  5. Build an Optimized Infrastructure-as-a-Service Internal Cloud
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  6. Use Cloud Computing to Achieve Small Enterprise Savings
    Small businesses are in a unique position to gain advantage with cloud computing.
  7. Vendor Landscape: Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service
    Options are proliferating as Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides a highly agile and low capital cost option for outsourcing IT infrastructure.
  8. Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud
    You cannot afford to assume that the data center has unlimited capacity; this is even more true for the internal cloud.
  9. Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management
    Add a layer of abstraction and automation to your infrastructure to create a private, virtual private, public, or hybrid cloud environment.
  10. Power the IaaS Cloud with a Cloud Management Solution
    Virtualization alone does not provide the automation, self-service, orchestration, and metering you need to offer a true cloud infrastructure service.
View the full Solution Road Map