Among the cloud’s great promises are the lure of unmatched agility and scale delivering IT applications and services. Along with these great promises the cloud’s early days have also seen challenges handling governance of applications as they stretch dynamically across their virtualized infrastructures, and actually simplifying management of multitiered applications as they deploy across private and hybrid private/public clouds. A strong ‘felt need’ for simplified management of enterprise application portfolios across multiple supporting cloud service platforms has emerged. In fact, to realize the agility and scaling goals of the cloud across a whole portfolio of applications, providing that kind of consistent management for a heterogeneous mix of infrastructures is an essential tool for IT moving forward.

 

 

Recognizing this, as Dell has strengthened its hand for enabling its enterprise customers to meet these challenges of the clouds with its acquisition of Enstratius on May 6. Enstratius’ Cloud Management System brings a ‘cloud neutral’ approach to providing consistent governance and management to enterprise applications across a flexible mix of virtualized cloud environments in private and hybrid private/public deployments. Enterprises are able to leverage the capabilities of virtual data center management platforms from say, VMware and OpenStack and integrate them into a portfolio of applications managed from Enstratius’ CMS. If needs dictate the use of public clouds for overload computing, flexibly expanded development resources, or automated disaster recovery across applications, secure access to public cloud resources from, say, Rackspace, Azure, or Terremark services (to name a few) can be enabled from CMS via integrated functionality and APIs. The net effect is to introduce a layer of consistency in managing applications across the multiple virtual infrastructure platforms.

 

 

As enterprise customers, and service providers supporting them, address their need for consistent, scalable controls, and simplified management of applications across multiple participating clouds, a layer of management such as Dell’s newly acquired Enstratius CMS may provide an important building block in enabling the cloud’s potential. Kudos to Dell for perceiving the importance of this need, and bringing the Enstratius CMS into its menu of offerings for cloud IT.

 

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