Quest floats Cloud Automation Platform 7.5

It's been a while since I last spoke with Brian Wilson, Quest's Director of Cloud Services (formerly of Surgient and a Kusnetzky Group client), and his colleague Nicole Tanzillo, Quest's Senior Product Marketing Manager. Since that time, Surgient was acquired by Quest. Quest has taken the Surgient provisioning, management and automation products and has started the process of integrating them into Quest's portfolio. Quest Cloud Automation Platform 7.5 is a re-branded and enhanced version of a former Surgent product.

Here's what Quest has to say about what's new in version 7.5

Quest's Cloud Automation Platform is unmatched at reducing administrative workloads. And now, with the launch of version 7.5, it makes management, migration, reporting and deployment even easier. Improvements or additions deliver the following benefits:

• Instant Cloud Insight with the Cloud Management Dashboard – Graphical view of pooled infrastructure enables cloud administrators to easily manage live services and capacity.
• Self-Service VM Migration – New graphical interface enables administrators to safely manage migration recommendations from performance-management tools (i.e., VMware vMotion, DRS, and DPM) while maintaining the integrity of a true self-service cloud.
• In-Depth Reporting with Chargeback Support – Fully redesigned reporting feature supports multiple chargeback methodologies and provides comprehensive data for inclusion in third-party business intelligence tools.
Enterprise Deployment Modes – New persistent and debug deployment modes enable long-running deployments and simplify the development of new IT services.

Snapshot analysis

Organizations live on Internet time now. This means that their information systems and the supported applications must be up and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. There simply is no time for unscheduled downtime. There’s little time for scheduled downtime for system maintenance or backup of critical data. This remains true as organizations move some application components, applications or complete workloads into cloud computing environments.

IT decision-makers have historically faced the challenge of making what the IT organization does able to match the ever changing list of requirements presented by end users and customers. They need tools that help them start with today's application systems hosted in their own datacenter(s) and move some or all of them into cloud computing environments. This means being able to provision, monitor and manage a number of complex elements.Quest (and Surgient) have long been suppliers of these tools.

Their approach to cloud management is clearly an outgrowth of what they've done before and enhanced to deal with today's multi-tier, multi-platform and multiple virtual machine technology environment.

You might find the capabilities offered by the evolutionary product to be very useful.