DynamicOps Introduces Private/Public Cloud Management Platform

DynamicOps, a maker of software for managing virtualized IT environments, introduced the DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center (DCAC) for setting up and managing on-demand IT services for either a private or public cloud infrastructure. DynamicOps software works in heterogeneous environments. The company signed an OEM deal with Dell in September in which DynamicOps software will be sold as part of Dell's Virtual Integrated System architecture.

The DCAC platform also manages physical IT assets and services from a public cloud providers. The DCAC includes four major components: Physical Resource Manager, for bare-metal provisioning of x86 and x64 servers, including hypervisors, on Windows or Linux operating systems; External Cloud Manager, a portal for provisioning and managing private or public cloud services; DesignCenter, for integrating DCAC with existing systems and management processes; and Virtual Resource Manager, for automating delivery and operational control of virtual resources, including lifecycle management of virtual desktops and servers.

The Virtual Resource Manager was DynamicOps's first product after it was founded as a unit of the financial services company Credit Suisse and then spun off as a separate company two-and-a-half years ago. Generally, businesses are moving to private clouds behind their own firewall first, before signing up with public cloud providers due to concerns about security and multi-tenancy. DynamicOps is also offering public cloud management because it believes that's where the market is headed.

IT resource management software has become a very competitive space of late, including from some of the software industry's giants, including HP, IBM, BMC, VMware and others, said Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst: "Everybody and their brother is in the market." But even though DynamicOps is not as well known, its product is actually quite mature and is considered best-of-breed, Scott said. "They've been on the market longer than other vendors and they are further along in their versioning."

DynamicOps customers tend to be medium-to-large sized enterprises that may have 10 to 20 host servers and a few hundred virtual machines running on them, said Bourdeau. An example is the University of Buckingham in the U.K. where students in an Applied Computing program can provision their own virtual servers through a portal for lab work, eliminating  a bottleneck where IT staff had to do the setup. The DCAC sells for $100 per desktop or $1,495 per server socket.