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Adaptive Computing's Cloud Management Solution Gets a Makeover

How strong can the brain really be without some legs, arms and other vital limbs to go along with it?

This question was certainly on Adaptive Computing’s mind when it considered a makeover to its Moab Cloud Suite, its flagship cloud management platform. 

“In the past, our cloud product has been focused on our intelligence engine, which is the Moab brain,” Chad Harrington, vice president of marketing, told TMCnet. “It’s that brain that’s really our core technology; that’s where our patents are, that’s why customers buy us.”

“In the past, we’ve sold that intelligence engine and we’ve plugged into other components – other arms and legs you might say – to do the provisioning, to do the portal, to do the service catalogue,” he added. “Our latest release of the Moab suite is an end-to-end platform so now we take our brain and we package it up with some arms and legs that are required to build a full standalone private cloud.”

Today, Adaptive Computing – the manager of the world’s largest computing installations with its Moab self-optimizing cloud management and HPC workload management solution – announced the availability of Moab Cloud Suite 7.0, its end-to-end integrated intelligent cloud management platform, bringing touchless optimization to private clouds.

Designed to build upon the previous version of the Moab intelligence engine, the latest version adds true end-to-end cloud management. The latest release includes a service catalogue, user portal, provisioning tools, account manager, and operations database, among other features. With the new version, IT buyers can now purchase, from a single source, the tools they need to automate and optimize their private clouds.

“This release is about not just being a brain but being a full functioning private cloud,” Harrington said.

One of the main benefits of the new version is its ability to bring end-to-end cloud management as the Moab Cloud Suite now includes a cloud resource monitor, database, and provisioning manager integrated with the Moab intelligence engine for an end-to-end cloud management solution. The solution provides true touchless management and optimization of cloud services from self-service portal request and admin dashboard monitoring through to automated policy-based actions across the service lifecycle, according to company officials.

Moreover, the cloud management platform includes a new service catalog that is touted for simplifying self service provisioning and increasing cloud service reliability. With this feature, administrators are provided with a way to specify and present a variety of standardized, proven services users can quickly choose from.

“It makes it much easier for end users, not just IT people, to request and utilize services,” Harrington said.

The cloud platform also boasts cloud service lifecycle reporting which supplies enhanced visibility into usage trends and issues via the administrator dashboard. With this tool, administrators can quickly understand and optimize service and resource performance in the cloud environment. Some of the elements include services view, which visualizes the status of current services; requested actions report that lets administrators and users track the current actions automated by policies or requested by users; and VM lifecycle report which presents all actions–administrator, user and auto policy initiated -- for a given VM from birth to decommission.

Other unique features of the release include enhanced chargeback functionality so that users can better understand and utilize complex departmental hierarchies; an improved self-service portal that makes it easier to navigate, make service requests, check service status, and accomplish management tasks; and a new Moab Web Services integration framework, which provides easier standard integration and customization for cloud environments.

Also today, the cloud management provider announced the availability of the Moab HPC Suite 7.0, its enhanced data center system offering designed to improve IT service delivery. Moab HPC 7.0 is designed to boost system productivity and hardware utilization rates, delivering a seamless scheduling and balancing of workloads, according to company officials.

The new HPC suite, powered by Moab, was crafted to preclude service failures by correctly deploying applications and infrastructure elements, and optimizing hardware to reduce costs.

One of the chief benefits of the new HPC suite is the introduction of the TORQUE 4.0 job resource manager, which was developed to bolster scalability management as resource needs intensify. Users will now be able to save time as they initiate tasks with Job Radix, thanks to the TORQUE feature. It also improves network communications by utilizing TCP to transfer data between nodes and more efficiently distributes communications.

Other advantages of the HPC suite include: new job cancellation policies enhance the efficiency of the system by eliminating the remaining sub-jobs once the solution is found; the addition of ODBC-compliant database support for PostgreSQL and Oracle (News - Alert); an improved administrative dashboard to introduce one-click job submission; and accounting flexibility.

For Adaptive Computing, a company that focuses on largest, most complex, most powerful systems out there, its latest announcements are right in line with the company’s core mission.

“We are all about fully lifecycle cloud management,” Harrington said. “We believe that cloud isn’t just about deploying a virtual machine on a server once but about managing the overall cloud pool of resources over time. As services come and go, as servers come and go, as users come and go, as machines fail, we are continuously optimizing the cloud. We are making sure that it’s operating at peak efficiency and meeting all the service level agreements that are required.”

For more on Adaptive Computing, click here.

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