One of the worrying developments that spin-off from the widespread penetration of virtualisation technologies is that the pressure put on internal IT departments is ramping up. If they are not able to provision a service or a virtual machine in less than a day company departments and Lines of Business will start looking outside at third party suppliers.
In way of course this can be seen as a good thing because the expectation of flexible and fast provisioning is opening up the market to the service provider community. The downside of this, however, is that user businesses will still require an overall level of operational coherence and compliance that has to be driven by over-arching policies. That demand for flexibility, if unfettered and un-channelled, can lead straight into the dangers of anarchic mayhem.
Trying to contain this trend is now the key target for Jason Cowie, Vice President of Product Management with Embotics.
The company’s weapon is V-Commander, an automated virtualisation and private Cloud management system. This can be used to create Virtual Machines (VMs) from centrally managed templates. The templates can define who can create a VM, work with policies on what that individual is allowed to create, and attaches each VM created to an individual user rather a default of `admin’. It also requires important features set time limits on each VM, which would allow for the automatic reclamation of resources that would otherwise be wasted on live but unused VMS.
The strong trend now is for users to want more capacity from a virtualised environment without the need to add resources. This has been driven by the growing demand for IT onDemand, which has prompted Embotics to add to V-Commander the ability to deliver infrastructure, on demand, in a safe secure and fully audited self-service portal.
While Embotics is primarily targeting enterprises looking to build private Cloud environments, Cowie is well aware of the potential for V-Commander to add some real value in the service provider marketplace. Most of its current customer base falls into a mid-market category, typically around 200 to 300 VMs. He describes this as the sweet spot at the moment. But he is also seeing growing traction amongst service providers, particularly amongst those that see the self-service portal offering with automated charge back as a good lever.
He was at the recent VMworld event and put the product onto a USB stick memory as a giveaway, telling potential customers to try installing and running it so they could set up fully automated provisioning of VM services. If they failed they were offered $100. So far he claims not to have paid out a red cent.
There can be, of course, a strong correlation in the operation requirements of a mid-market business and a large enterprise division or department. So it is becoming more common that enterprise departments are looking to set up their own VM implementations rather than wait for the IT department to get round to fulfilling their particular requirements.
Here, the ability to build VMs on templates that are driven by company-wide policies determined by central IT offers them the chance to do just that, but do it within a company-wide policy framework.
The Embotics revenue model - 98% product sales and 2% services - also helps it work with partners such as service providers and systems integrators. It complements the services that are provided by partners, which is why the likes of Computacenter is now one. The product set can be used by such partners to both identify poorly used and wasted resources in a customer’s virtualised environment, and baseline the resources already in place. Then using the policy and templating tools the partners can rapidly build the new services required.
