Optimising policies on HP’s CSA

The bigger the cloud service a business builds the less likely it becomes possible to directly manage the detailed operation of each application or tool used as part of the services provided. This means that there comes a need to move to the next level of abstraction, policy management, in order to have effective control over any processes being run, whether those processes are required to run aspects of the business or to ensure that it operates in a secure fashion, with only authenticated individuals accessing data and business processes.  

Having policies is only part of the battle, however. Given the speed and complexity at which cloud services are expected to operate these days, getting the policies to work to their optimum is equally important. This is the target of US-based Adaptive Computing, a provider of policy-based optimisation software for private cloud and High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

The company has just introduced its Moab Cloud Optimizer Integration tool specifically targeted at HP’s Cloud Service Automation (CSA) version 3.2. This can visually set and monitor a range of cloud policies in order to continuously optimise service placement, service performance, utilisation and capacity management, resource reservations and resource maintenance.

Its policy-based optimisation gives IT organisations management control over a number of important operational criteria. For example, it can maximise resource utilisation to deliver rates two to three times higher than virtualisation alone, and support more complex and production application services in the cloud by optimising service placement across diverse resources and datacentres, enhancing HP’s service offerings and preventing service issues.  

The company claims it can reduce maintenance costs and time by 50 percent by automating repetitive management tasks such as migrating services for maintenance, and meet service-level agreements by consistently enforcing service performance and availability with auto-performance remediation.

“With its out-of-the-box policies, Moab Cloud Optimizer helps IT organizations derive higher ROI from HP Cloud Service Automation private cloud environments,” said Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “This product enables clouds to support higher capacities and lower costs for private cloud workloads, while meeting service-level agreements.”