Ten cloud management companies worth watching

As enterprise IT departments begin to consider how to deploy private, public and mixed clouds, how to manage the cloud becomes a challenging task. Tracking the cost of running instances on demand, monitoring application performance, planning capacity, and optimizing cloud-based Web sites all require it consideration.

To reduce the challenges that IT managers face in managing new environments, many companies are beginning to provide cloud computing management tools. "Perhaps in the blink of an Dennis, a new cloud management tool was born," said Callaghan, senior analyst at the 451 Group. Here are 10 of the most interesting cloud management companies we've sorted out.

Alfabet

Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Product: Planningit, an IT management suite that integrates it planning and business.

How it works: Planningit is a suite of modules, each of which is geared towards a specific part of the strategic it plan based on the architecture. For example, the suite has modules such as application architecture, business requirements management, enterprise architecture, portfolio and value management, and all information and functionality is provided by a single interface.

Price: Charge According to usage range, bandwidth and user type.

Reason for concern: Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research studies at the US market research firm Nucleus, said today's IT department generally believes that cloud computing is a transport model, but a year ago it was considered a "end-to-end it" business model. In this shift, IT departments are aware that traditional IT governance processes also apply to cloud computing, including processes such as asset management, inventory accounting, cost measurement, and service level agreements (SLAs). However, many IT departments, while reviewing the decision-making process, feel that they are not very clear about how the application and infrastructure are managed internally. And Planningit is just in a position to help them with this. Wettemann said: "Both in the cloud and locally, planningit can provide information on the company's IT investment benefits." ”

Apica

Headquarters: California State Palo Alto

Product: Apica Webexcellence, a suite of tools designed for load testing and performance monitoring of cloud applications.

How it works: Apica uses a four-part, cloud-based approach to ensure that the site runs in the best possible state. In the case of load testing, Apica uses custom user scenario scripts that meet performance and business objectives to simulate real-world load scenarios in a cloud-based test environment. The external cloud Agent software is responsible for evaluating and analyzing all browsers and area conditions, and apica can pinpoint the problem by identifying capacity and load thresholds. Apica's customizable Performance Monitor enables day-to-day vigilance of uptime and response times and alerts by SMS or email. The suite also leverages tuning technology and combines static caching technology to raise web throughput up to 40 times times the current level. The overload protection function can protect the performance and the system under the circumstance of sudden high load. In addition, with additional Apica servermontior tools, IT departments can compare performance data and integrate performance data from the firewall with load test data.

Price: Apica Premium monitoring Service charges a minimum of USD 80 per month. This includes allowing users to use selenium scripts for open source testing and monitoring from hundreds of locations worldwide.

Reason for concern: Apica U.S. headquarters opened in June 2011, but the Swedish company is no stranger to multinationals trying to improve their performance through the cloud infrastructure. The company has amassed a large global customer base, including transgaming. TransGaming recently announced that they are using the Apica LoadTest in the Webexcellence Suite, which helped transgaming effectively improve cloud-based on-demand gaming service performance during the three-week load test. "Apica has access to the U.S. market with its good service, rich experience, excellent professionals and numerous customers and partners," Audrey Rasmussen, analyst at market research firm Ptak Noel, said in a blog. It is more like a star enterprise, worthy of our attention. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)