Eucalyptus, NetSocket Roll Out Cloud Management Tools

According to Network Computing Reports' recently released "Research: Private Cloud Vision vs. Reality," 21% of 414 respondents currently have private clouds, and an additional 30% have plans under way to launch clouds. Vendors are responding with upgrades and new tools to manage and deploy clouds--Eucalyptus Systems and NetSocket are two of the latest.

On-premise cloud provider Eucalyptus is rolling out a new version of its open source product today that aligns the OS community and enterprises on the same platform so they can contribute, build, run and manage cloud development and deployments. NetSocket recently announced its Cloud Experience Manager (CEM) IP product, geared at managing the end-user experience in different types of environments.

One of the new features in Eucalyptus 3.1 is FastStart, which enables users to deploy on-premises, Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service clouds in less than 20 minutes, the company said.

Other enhancements include Eucalyptus 3 source code availability on GitHub, enterprise platform deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vCenter 5 and community project management capabilities that provide support for defects, fixes and feature requests.

With the release of version 3.1, organizations will be able to accelerate their on-premises, private cloud deployments, says Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos. "Most private cloud platforms can support a high-availability application, but in addition to that Eucalyptus takes care of its own" cloud so that if anything goes down there's a copy running on another machine that steps in immediately, he says.

"Long term, everything will run on clouds--both private public and hybrid. But the most common use today is scalable Web services," says Mickos.

Sporting goods company Puma was using a variety of hosting platforms, including AWS, for several of its websites without a lot of documentation, which created headaches, says Jay Basnight, team head of digital strategy at Puma. "What we saw was by deploying on a managed hosting platform with Eucalyptus, we could save 35 to 50%" in costs, he says.

Puma began by migrating its website to Eucalyptus 2 and relaunching it on a private cloud. "We built it from the ground up; we wanted control," Basnight said. With Eucalyptus, "We could do a lot of different things like use load balancers instead of a one-size-fits-all" model, whereas when the company had so many sites hosted on AWS, there was no "well-defined chain for accountability if something went wrong." Puma was also concerned about maintaining privacy since it collects a lot of user information and didn't want its data misused.

Puma has since moved to Eucalyptus 3, which Basnight says is more robust. Version 2 "had some rough edges, and when we moved to [version] 3 we handled those issues." With version 2, for example, the company wasn't able to launch new virtual machines inside the cloud environment, he says.

Now, says Basnight, Puma centralized all of its systems "into one data center, with one flexible environment where our agencies and other programmers can have a little more freedom and flexibility, and we can maintain some tight technical brand infrastructure."

The new features are available to customers today.

Next: NetSocket Launches Cloud Management ToolNetSocket, a provider of real-time cloud service assurance technology, recently announced its Cloud Experience Manager (CEM) IP product geared at managing the end-user experience in different types of environments.

CEM, built on NetSocket's IP Correlation Engine, aims to provide visibility into session, content and network quality on a hop-by-hop basis and deliver immediate insight into network issues, the company said. These can include voice, video and data degradation, incomplete visibility into multivendor hybrid cloud, dropped connections and IP network events. The technology is delivered in an appliance or SaaS model, and measures the user experience by automatically correlating session, content and IP topology quality events in real time for every individual user, according to NetSocket. CEM provides one screen to anticipate, isolate and offer solutions to remediate issues, the company said.

IP assurance is something vendors have offered for a long time, notes Michael Biddick, CEO of Fusion PPT, a cloud computing consulting firm. "I would argue that the term IP assurance is really about packet management, customer experience management or application performance management--something that a lot of vendors have been doing for quite some time," he says.

Competing vendors that already offer this capability as a passive, physical appliance include NetScout, CA/NetQoS and OPNET AppExpert, according to Biddick, who cautions that the appliance model has its drawbacks. "Offering the solution as a physical appliance introduces problems for public clouds that may move their virtual machines quite a bit from data center to data center, even in other countries. The use of these appliances requires an understanding of the network topology to application topology that often is not possible in the public cloud."

Cloud providers and enterprises that look to deploy IP assurance products will also find it a challenge, says Biddick. "SaaS is also a hard deployment model, given the volume of traffic that needs to be analyzed, and many vendors have shifted from this approach over the years after they find customer resistance." But he adds that most are dropping the SaaS approach due to low customer adoption and are switching to a virtual appliance instead.

CEM "is playing a critical role in ensuring the quality of collaboration and communication services offered through our cloud computing services," said Stephen Webster, president and CEO of Houston-based StratITsphere, a NetSocket customer, in a statement. "As an end user and provider of this service to our customers, we can achieve per-session visibility into the service quality of multivendor cloud communications, something which no other cloud computing service currently offers."

Pricing for CEM starts at $2 per IP-connected device and decreases based on the number of endpoints.