Hyper 9 offers new take on virtualisation management
Cloud estimator helps give true record of costs says company
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 18:31, 25 August 2010
Hyper9 has launched a new calculation tool focused on bringing greater transparency to the "black box" of virtualisation initiatives.
According to Jonathan Reeve, Hyper 9’s VP of product management, the company had to respond to the way that virtualisation was having an impact on enterprises. “We were talking to a lot of folks who had gone down the road of 30 percent of virtualisation and needed to know more about the way that their enterprise was working. In particular, they needed to know if they had sufficient resources to implement changes to their virtual machines.”
He said that companies were starting to move to the clouds and were implementing features like accurate chargeback as well as having to be more agile about provisioning applications. “That’s the difference between internal cloud and what you’re already doing – the departments pay for what is actually been used,” he said.
Hyper9’s Cloud Cost Estimator is a customisable dashboard that uses data and analytics to estimate how much it would cost to run a company’s virtual machines on Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering. By using the system, customers will be able to work out how much memory and CPU capacity have been allocated to individual virtual machines. It will also work out how much bandwidth is being used by the network and what the overall storage needs are. By combining all these, organisations will be able to work out what it would cost to duplicate on-premise equipment within an Amazon cloud.
Reeve said that unlike some cloud computing estimators, the dashboard works out the precise costs and doesn’t deal with rough estimates. “We’re measuring exactly what they’re using – we know about I/Os, we know how VMs are provisioned."
The Cloud Cost Estimator can also be integrated with third-party tools such as Sharepoint for additional reporting features.
