Platform ISF 2.1 Improves Use and Breadth of Private Cloud Management

Updated: January 25, 2011

By automating delivery of complex enterprise infrastructure and production applications across heterogeneous virtual, physical and public cloud resources, Platform ISF also helps reduce electricity and cooling requirements while freeing up capacity in data centers. The management layer provides improved monitoring, policy management, and workload management across multiple and heterogenous cloud and traditional IT stacks. By capturing corporate standards and business policies within the automation engine, companies can improve both compliance and security, said Platform Computing.

Via the single-pane administration capabilities, what Toronto-based Platform calls a "cloud cockpit," users can self-select approved services to support a wide variety of applications. Enhanced end-user portals are also new, including drag-and-drop portlet-based dashboards and customizable application instantiation pages.

What's more, the applications be can monitored from both private and public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The degree of management allows for future planning and capacity management, to help exploit hybrid computing benefits and cut the total overall costs of supporting applications.

Enhancing agility

"Enterprises looking to take advantage of the cloud do so for many reasons but one of the key ones is to enhance their agility in response to changing business dynamics," said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner, in a release. "This means that the technology used to manage cloud environments should be similarly agile and act to facilitate and not impede this industry movement. IT organizations should look for tools that can address the various cloud usage scenarios without demanding excessive investments in management infrastructure or staff support."

Key capabilities in Platform ISF 2.1 include: self-service and chargeback, policy-based automated provisioning of applications, dynamic scaling of applications to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and unification of distributed and mixed-vendor resource pools for sharing. A unique "Active-Active" multiple data center supports higher availability and scalability by leveraging Oracle GoldenGate.

The goal is to manage the heterogeneous applications lifecycle, not just multiple cloud instances.

Ease of use benefits in the new release, which is available now, include account management and delegation based on applications or business processes. Such delegation can occur for such cloud-supported functions as platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and hierarchical applications and their supporting components and services. Also included is self-service hierarchical account and resource management (including Active Directory for 10,000+ users) supporting an unlimited number of organizational tiers.