ScaleXtreme Ramps Up Server Management For The Federated Cloud Era

ScaleXtreme, Palo Alto based server management company with a focus on the cloud era, yesterday announced the availability Dynamic Server Assembly, an update to their existing free and premium products. This gives their users an ability to create highly structured servers across many different cloud providers. As we move towards a more federated cloud ecosystem, a server management solution with this kind of advanced feature set is a welcome solution and it can be attractive to enterprises who face the pain point more than anyone else.

First a little background

I would call server management an age old requirement (under the IT timescale) for enterprises looking beyond humans to manage complex IT environments. SMBs with few servers can easily manage their servers with handful of system admins. However, in the complex enterprise environments, we need tools that can automate, monitor and help manage servers at scale. Traditionally, the offerings from HP, BMC, CA and IBM offered the necessary tools that made managing the complex IT environments easier. These tools helped organizations keep tabs on the servers irrespective of hardware vendors. However, they came with their own baggage. They are expensive and they themselves are complex.

As the virtualization era took hold in the enterprise space, VMware offered a set of management tools. It was a pretty good solution for the enterprise IT because VMware had a runaway marketshare on virtualization. With the movement to cloud, especially with the advent of a federated cloud era, there is no good solution in the market which made server management seamless. The top four companies from the traditional era cannot compete in the cloud era effectively because they have 12-18 month release cycles and it is considered to be glacial time scale compared to the rapid pace of innovation in the cloud era. Puppet and Chef with their configuration management tools stepped in to help in the cloud world but they are not comprehensive in terms of having full lifecycle features like management and monitoring (somebody using these tools correct me if I am wrong in this distinction).

This is where ScaleXtreme steps in to offer a simple but effective solutions for enterprises wanting to manage complex IT infrastructure in the federated cloud era. They offer a unified dashboard that helps to provision and manage servers/VMs through their entire lifecycle. They will be able to manage all their physical and virtual infrastructure (across private clouds or several public cloud providers) seamlessly without any complexity or bloat that is usually part of the traditional systems.

Dynamic Server Assembly

It is a new feature that is part of both their free ScaleXtreme Express and premium ScaleXtreme Xpert offerings. As we go into a more federated ecosystem, organizations are going to use many different cloud providers of all sizes and shapes based on their performance, security and governance needs. As more and more providers creep into the IT environment, it becomes tough to create specific templates or structures for their VMs and apply across all the providers in the environment. Dynamic Server Assembly feature makes it easy to model, provision and launch servers across a variety of cloud computing providers and platforms. With this ability to model and structure servers, users can easily rebuild and deploy servers on any platform, on the fly, using their smart architecture. It is like creating a blueprint, stamping on any server and get it going. I saw the demo and I can assure you that even a kid can manage complex IT without any fuss.

This has many advantages to the enterprises. Some of them are:

• The speed with which system admins can ramp up their deployment adds tremendous agility to the business
• The accuracy of using such a templated approach reduces any errors minimizing costly mistakes that are part and parcel of traditional IT
• The ease with which you can replicate workloads across many different cloud providers helps organization avoid the dreaded vendor lock-in and, also, helps them take the SLA needs in their own hands

ScaleXtreme is an interesting company. If you are someone interested in server management space and want to figure out how it is going to work out, I strongly urge you to check out their demo.

Related articles

• ScaleXtreme launches hybrid cloud management service (networkworld.com)
• ScaleXtreme Launches Hybrid Cloud Management Service (pcworld.com)
• ScaleXtreme Offers Free Middleware for Cloud Management (readwriteweb.com)
• ScaleXtreme launches hybrid cloud management service (infoworld.com)