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Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller

The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) enables organizations to build their own internal private clouds as well as manage public clouds. The CUIC is a vendor-neutral, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud provisioning and management solution that provides physical and virtual infrastructure control, management and monitoring via single pane of glass. The CUIC addresses the complex challenges of building, deploying and managing a wide variety of IT services in private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud environments. With CUIC, organizations achieve faster service delivery, greater IT agility and significant cost savings. The CUIC significantly improves service levels and operational efficiencies by providing service-centric IT management with end-to-end automation capabilities

The growing demand to leverage external cloud infrastructure brings additional complexity to the existing IT operations. Integrating with external cloud provider brings risk of vendor lock-in and administrative overhead. The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller provides seamless integration with external cloud infrastructure. The Controller provides unified and secure interface for creating, controlling, provisioning and monitoring virtualized infrastructure resources across private and public clouds. It allows you to monitor and manage both private and public cloud infrastructures more efficiently and cost effectively.

Typically gathering machines, operating systems, installing applications and configuration is a time consuming exercise. The Controller reduces this process by providing self-service portal so that the users can create the servers in a matter of minutes. The automation of server provisioning and configuration will make it easy to reproduce or repurpose servers, an otherwise very time consuming process. The users can rapidly build or tear down the complex development and testing environments using self-service provisioning portal. Even though the users are self-provisioned, IT administrators should still remain in control to set and enforce the policies. The Controller enables IT operations to set and enforce policies easily to ensure the enterprise-wide compliance.

The Unified Infrastructure Controller delivers visibility, control and automation so that you can effectively manage virtualized environment, enabling you to deliver quality services, mitigate risks, and achieve operational cost savings. Via a unified dashboard, the controller provides superior visualization to help identify trends, see impacts and take actions. The CUIC provides intelligence to the IT teams about virtual infrastructure resource utilization. This type of intelligence will help standardization of infrastructure resource management across public and private clouds. It will help further to optimize resource utilization and workloads across all virtual infrastructures.


Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller


With Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller, Customers Can:
  • Build internal private clouds rapidly with internal standards and procedures to maximize the infrastructure investments.
  • Build public IaaS clouds with low cost of entry, white-label ready and flexible billing models
  • Integrate and manage public clouds with no vendor lock-in risks and with zero administration overhead
  • Use unified solution and single pane of glass for consistent and seamless integration experience across private, public and hybrid clouds.
  • Offer end user self-service capabilities using CUIC self service provisioning portal, service catalog and service delivery orchestrator
  • Transform and automate virtual environments into highly efficient private clouds.
  • Integrate with existing enterprise management systems, policies and processes
  • Automate physical infrastructure management including bare metal provisioning, blade power management, physical storage and network management
  • Manage, orchestrate and transform FlexPods to clouds

Capabilities:
  • Single pane of management across private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds
  • Self-service portal and service catalog
  • Policy based adaptive provisioning using CloudSenseTM Analytics
  • Enables multi-tenant virtual data center with sufficient security controls, IT policies, role based access and network segmentation
  • Continuous capacity monitoring
  • Comprehensive infrastructure management solution -- discovery, monitoring, provisioning, life-cycle mgmt and operational management
  • Bare metal provisioning
  • Integrated virtual and physical infrastructure management -- computing, storage and network
  • Infrastructure workflow automation using model based orchestrator with workflow UI designer and built-in task libraries
  • Real-time visualization tools - reports, heat maps, dashboards
  • Real-time assessment, operational, performance & chargeback reporting
  • Role-based access control and policy management
  • Continuous capacity planning and monitoring
  • Chargeback with budget and resource limiting
  • Integration with enterprise management systems such as LDAP and CMDB
  • Unified dashboard, interface across private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds

Features

Benefits

Virtual Infrastructure auto-discovery

The auto discovery of all infrastructure resources enables IT teams to manage fine- grained tracking and traceability across all clouds.
Tracks all the changes to IT resources in real time and makes the data instantly available.

Self-service portal

The automation of server provisioning & configuration will significantly reduce provisioning times, an otherwise very time consuming process.
The users can rapidly build or tear down the complex development, testing and training environments

Policy based automated provisioning

Enables IT to set and enforce policies easily to ensure the enterprise-wide compliance.
Automated rules and policies can be configured and applied to ensure consistent IT governance across private and public clouds

Multi-hypervisor support

Doesn’t need to integrate or administer multiple hypervisor management products.
Consistent policies, reporting and workflows across multi-hypervisor technologies

Multi-cloud engine

Doesn’t need to integrate or administer multiple hypervisor management products.
Consistent policies, reporting and workflows across multi-hypervisor technologies
Virtual compute automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Virtual Servers
Virtual network automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Virtual Network
Virtual storage automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Virtual Storage
Physical compute automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Physical Servers
Physical network automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Physical Network
Physical storage automation Discover, monitor, provision & manage Physical Storage
VDI management and automation Enables organizations to transform VDI infrastructure to desktop clouds by abstracting all the complexities of VDI infrastructure integration and management.

Simplifies and centralizes overall VDI management functions such as profile management, desktop provisioning, desktop policy management, desktop cloning by eliminating point tools.
Virtual Data center Management With virtual data centers, organizations can create multi-tenant isolated environments to combine virtual resources – compute, storage & network, operational details, rules and policies to manage specific group requirements.
Bare metal provisioning Empowers users and IT admins to deploy servers more rapidly and to manage servers more efficiently.

Drastically improves the time-to-market by automating server deployments-from bare metal to just a few minutes instead of days. Supports automating server provisioning at remote locations.

VM life cycle management

Manage entire VM life cycle actions based on policies set by administrators

Monitoring & Alerts

Provides unified view of all resources across multiple public and private clouds with comprehensive event management & threshold based alerts

Chargeback

Enables business units to account, monitor and report resource usage and associated costs at the group level

Performance management

The automated performance monitoring can help identify under and over-utilized assets

Dynamic capacity planning

Provides visibility into virtual infrastructure resources consumption in real time that significantly improves capacity planning

SLA Mgmt

To improve communications and coordination between business and technical teams
To track overall performance and to identify areas for improvement

Real time operational reporting

Real time reporting of resources health and utilization capabilities reduces troubleshooting time and VM sprawls
What is the Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC)?
The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller enables organizations to build their own internal private clouds or public IaaS clouds. The CUIC is a vendor-neutral, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud provisioning and management solution that provides physical and virtual infrastructure control, management and monitoring via single pane of glass. The CUIC powers virtualized multi-tenant data centers by providing necessary security controls, policy management, role based access control and network isolation. The CUIC provides physical infrastructure management including bare metal provisioning, blade level life cycle management and monitoring. The CUIC addresses the complex challenges of building, deploying and managing a wide variety of IT services in private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud environments. With CUIC, organizations achieve faster service delivery, greater IT agility and significant cost savings. The CUIC significantly improves service levels and operational efficiencies by providing service-centric IT management with end-to-end automation capabilities.

What are CUIC key capabilities?
  • Build internal private clouds rapidly with internal standards and processes
  • Build public IaaS Clouds
  • Manage and orchestrate hybrid clouds
  • Unified dashboard and single pane of interface across private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds
  • Deliver infrastructure and application services through policy driven self service provisioning portal and service catalog
  • Comprehensive physical & virtual infrastructure lifecycle management solution
  • Integrated infrastructure provisioning and management - computing, storage and network
  • Multi-tenant solution with required network security, segmentation and isolation
  • Role-based access control and policy management
  • Continuous capacity planning and monitoring
  • Chargeback with budget and resource limiting
  • Orchestration engine with easy to use graphical workflow designer
  • Integration with enterprise management systems such as LDAP and CMDB
  • Auto discovery, dynamic operational reporting and analytics
What problems does it solve?
  • Long lead times & errors associated with provisioning
  • Lack of integrated tools for top to bottom IT stack provisioning, management and monitoring
  • Lack of end-to-end virtual and cloud infrastructure management solution
  • Visibility into multiple infrastructure resources
  • Manual & labor-intensive configuration, provisioning and reporting processes
  • Consistent policy enforcement & compliance across the clouds
  • VM sprawl
  • Vendor lock-ins
  • Multiple interfaces to access and control public & private infrastructure
  • IT administrative overhead to manage multiple virtual infrastructure
What hypervisor technologies are supported?
We support the following hypervisor platforms by the general availability time, but planning to support other platforms as well in the future.
  • VMware ESX & ESXi
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Redhat KVM*
What cloud vendors are supported?
We support Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark & Savvis. (Other major cloud vendors will be supported in the future)
What are the system requirements for CUIC?
The CUIC will be provided as a downloadable virtual appliance. The following minimum system requirements are needed. For any other system configurations or custom installation, contact Cloupia-support@cloupia.com Hypervisor: ESX v3.5 or vSphere 4
  • Virtual hardware:
  • 2 vCPU
  • 1 vNetwork
  • 3 GB Memory
  • 12 GB disk
What are CUIC key differentiators?
The key differentiators from the similar virtual infrastructure management solutions in the market are:
  • Single pane of glass across private and hybrid clouds
  • Top to bottom IT stack provisioning – Physical and virtual compute, storage and networks
  • Multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud solution (vendor agnostic)
  • Continuous capacity monitoring
  • Self service provisioning portal with policy-driven automated provisioning
  • Advanced analytics for capacity planning, performance management & cost management
  • Cloud orchestration engine with easy to use workflow designer
What is CUIC’s value proposition?
  • Reduce operational costs and ensure policy driven compliance through self-service provisioning portal
  • Reduce administration costs by offering one solution to manage and control both internal virtual infrastructure and public clouds
  • Enables faster time to market by reducing provisioning errors and time
  • Seamless integration with public clouds such as Amazon and Rackspace for cloud bursting and hybrid cloud deployments without any vendor lock-in risks
  • Optimize infrastructure resources by dynamic allocation of resources and by reducing server sprawls
  • Comprehensive cloud management solution with low foot-print, lower cost of acquisition and implementation
How does CUIC help organizations with cloud computing initiatives?
The CUIC helps enterprises
  • to build internal private clouds
  • to leverage multiple public clouds without any vendor lock-in risks
  • to leverage multiple virtualization technologies
  • to avoid administration overhead to integrate with multiple cloud vendors
  • to build IT as a Service with self-service provisioning portal and service catalog
How does CUIC help organizations build internal private clouds or public IaaS clouds?
The adoption of cloud computing should follow a sequence of evolutionary steps rather than an overnight revolution. The best approach is to start with building a private cloud using internal resources and policies.
  • The CUIC provides self-provisioning portal to enable self-service.
  • Admins can define group permissions and resource quotas to create multi-tenant shared infrastructure
  • The CUIC enables business units to account, monitor and report resource usage and associated costs.
  • The CUIC provides capacity-planning insight and automated reclamation policies that increase resource utilization
  • Enables IT to automate many of its operations, policies and best practices.
What extra benefits and cost savings will enterprises realize if they already implemented virtualization?
The biggest barrier to more rapid virtualization is management of the virtual infrastructure. Without appropriate policies and tools, companies slow virtualization to avoid losing control. The CUIC provides the automation, governance, and control that allow companies to deploy virtualization beyond initial plans.
  • Automation of IT operations and integration with external cloud vendors to minimize labor overhead and free up resources for strategic initiatives
  • Optimize hardware utilization with a robust reservation system, driving more utility from existing resources and reducing the need for additional hardware
  • Dynamically allocate and recover virtual and physical resources to eliminate the threat of resource sprawl
  • Cost allocation also helps align resource consumption with business objectives and shows consumers the relative costs of service tiers.

How does it reduce server sprawl?

  • Reduces over-provisioning and unauthorized resource usage
  • Restricts consumption to a group’s pre-allocated resources
  • Provides review and approval of workflow automation for new requests
  • Automatically reclaims and reuses resources after the end of the lease period
  • Automatically reclaims and reuses inactive resources and abandoned resources
  • Provides real time visibility into resource consumption for dynamic capacity management.
  • Provides historical and trending reports for efficient capacity planning

What is self-service provisioning portal? And how does it help organizations?
Self-Service portal provides on-demand access to shared infrastructure for non-IT users to create, deploy and reconfigure multi-tier system configurations in seconds without IT involvement. Self-service management reduces administrative burden and infrastructure management costs for IT and empowers the business to execute company strategy, get to market faster and grow top-line revenue. It helps enterprises with the following benefits:

  • Reduce IT Service delivery cycle times via policy-driven automation
  • Align IT service delivery with business needs
  • Empower users to quickly access resources, eliminating wait times and inefficiencies
  • The users can rapidly build or tear down the complex development, testing and training environments.

Computing Platforms
Cisco
Components Model  Supported Version/ Interfaces 
UCS     
Chassis UCS 5100 Series  
Blade Servers  UCS B Series   
Rack Mounts  UCS C200 M2
UCS C210 M2		  
Fabric Interconnect  UCS 6100, 6200  
UCS Manager UCSM 1.0, 1.3, 1.4, 2.0, 2.1

HP
Type  Model  Supported Version /Interfaces 
Blade Servers  C7000*  
Rack Mounts Servers GL-380,
DL-700 Series		  
HP-ILO Management HP-ILO2 1.61 
* Note:  Management using ILO, HP Servers – ILO and PXE support.

Dell
Type  Model  Supported Version /Interfaces 
Rack Mounts Servers PowerEdge R200
Poweredge R210x		  

Storage Platforms
NetApp Storage 
Type Model  Supported Version /Interfaces 
Interfaces  ONCOMMAND 4.0.2
Interfaces ONTAP 7.3.6,  8.0.1,  8.0.2 (7 mode)
Storage Controller  FAS 2000,
FAS 3000,
FAS 6000 Series		  
Interfaces ZAPI 1.13 and above

EMC
Type Model  Supported Version /Interfaces 
VNX Block, File, Unified versions of
5100,
5300,
7500
 

Networking Platforms
Cisco Devices
Device Model  Supported Version/ Interfaces 
Data Center Switch Nexus 3K, 5K series 5.0 or above
  Nexus 1000v 4.2
Data Center Storage Switches  MDS 9000, 9124, 9148 Series Directors and Fabric Switches   
Security  PIX 8.0
  ASA 5500 Series  7.0

Brocade
Type  Model  Supported Version /Interfaces 
Fabric OS Switch:  
  Brocade 300 v6.3.0a
   
Network OS Switch: VDX 6710-54 v2.1.1
  VDX 6720-24 v2.1.1
  VDX 6730-32 v2.1.1

Virtualization
VMWare
Type Model Version
Management vCenter 5.1, 5.0, 4.1, 4.0
Hypervisor ESX/ESXi Versions 5.1, 5.0.0, 4.1.0, 4.0.0, 3.5
Plugin VSC 2.1
Microsoft  Hyper-V
Hypervisor Hyper-V Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 SP1 (Data Center / Enterprise / Standard)
Management System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
(Ver 2.04521.0 SP1)
RedHat KVM
Hypervisor RHEVH 5.6 - 9.3el5_6
Management RHEVM 2.2.4.51796
  VDSM 2.2.63.23
VDI 
Citrix     
  Xendesktop  Controller 5.5

Cloupia Prerequisites
Cloupia Virtual Appliance Deployment - Prerequisites
VMWare  ESX 3.5/ 4.x Or ESXi 4.x/5.0
vCPU  2
Memory  3 GB
Hard disk 40 GB

CUIC
OS  CentOS  5.x
Databases  MySQL  5.x
  Oracle  10g, 11g

Demo Request
Request Evaluation

What People Said
The converged infrastructure solutions based on pre-validated and pre-tested reference architecture accelerate the transformation to clouds. Converged infrastructure has been rapidly gaining traction because of its significant benefits such as simplifying and shortening the procurement process, hardware standardization for efficiencies, and significant savings on operating costs. Converged infrastructure have to be paired with advanced management and orchestration to fully realize the potential benefits and operational advantage. Organizations that have chosen FlexPod as their converged infrastructure are very attracted to Cloupia. Cloupia solution's streamlined simplicity and model-based orchestration capabilities are very impressive. We are also excited to see the expanded support for Vblock and VSPEX.
Scott Miller, Director of Cloud, Virtualization & the ATC, WWT Inc
One of the most exciting developments in IT is the transformation of the Datacenter. Driven by business requirements and cost pressures, today's Datacenter has to not only be fast and flexible, but also enable the IT specialists to focus on new projects and functions. Virtualization of the infrastructure is the fundamental step we have taken with our customers over the last years. With Cloupia we are able to take the next step by having a common tool to orchestrate all the infrastructure resources to optimize their usage. A key part of the Cloupia solution is the ability to automate the virtual and physical infrastructure for a more efficient IT operation and enable IT to respond fast to changing business needs.
Per Sedihn, CTO, Proact IT Group - Europe's Largest Storage Integrator, Europe
Cloupia is also easy to get up and running. I want a tool that will allow operators to manage multiple data centers holistically, through a single tool, and deploy infrastructure in a repeatable fashion. Cloupia is a FlexPod-validated product and that made it easy for us to deploy, provision and immediately benefit from the ITaaS capabilities the product has to offer. The Dashboards and Reporting metrics provide the essential "heads-up display" for us at Walz because they display real-time, hourly, daily, weekly, etc. resource utilization trending of our self-provisioned IT resources. Cloupia is a single-pane-of-glass solution that enabled us to deliver ITaaS by enabling unified management and automation of physical compute, network and storage along with virtual infrastructure of the FlexPod stack.
Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer, Walz Group
Entel is the leading provider of enterprise grade custom cloud solutions for small and medium business. Cloupia has enabled us to increase our capabilities and improve our service offerings with a comprehensive cloud management solution. Their self-service portal, service catalog, and policy driven automated provisioning provides customers the control and visibility of their cloud services. The deployment of Cloupia's CUIC product was painless and our Operations Team was able to put the box pre-integrated solution into full service within days. We are very impressed with Cloupia's product roadmap and are working together to better serve the South America marketplace.
Pablo Lambert, IT Advanced Development and Innovations Group, Entel, Chile
SAN Systems, a specialist data storage and management business unit of Distribution Central, will distribute Cloupia's core product offerings -- Unified Infrastructure Controller, CloudGenie and CloudIgnite -- to the Australian, New Zealand and Singapore markets.

With Cloupia's partnership, our partners can offer their customers fully automated data center infrastructure operations and improve resource utilization significantly. The integrated solution offers self-service management and provisioning of the entire FlexPod stack. Cloupia is therefore a complementary addition to our vendor portfolio, building on our commitment to deliver innovative, best-in-class technology. Cloupia's partnership with NetApp in particular creates greater customer development opportunities for our partners.
Nick Verykios, Managing Director, Distribution Central, Australia
Cloud and Converged Infrastructures are major IT trends driving the data center transformation. Cloupia is one of the innovative companies accelerating this transformation with its comprehensive data center and cloud orchestration capabilities. Cloupia FlexPod orchestration solutions demonstrate their expertise in converged infrastructure management in compliance with validated designs and best practices. They truly enable and empower partners and customers in their data center transformation journey with the necessary data center management and automation tools.
Chris Palmer, Managing Director, SCCS, Australia
At ESi, we see Cloupia as a predominant partner within our Cloud builder Ecosystem. ESi and Cloupia together can improve business and operational challenges for our clients in Canada. In the past six months, our teams in Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto have experienced an increased adoption of 'FlexPod' architectures. With this increased focus on converged technology, we have been evaluating Orchestration software suites in the marketplace and our team selected Cloupia for its best of breed product and the full suite of capabilities they offer.
Nicholas Laine, Director Architecture and Technologies, ESI Technologies, Canada
We evaluated VMware vCloud Director, Cisco Intelligent Automation, BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager and Cloupia Inc.’s Unified Infrastructure Controller. Cloupia’s solution is appealing because it supports the NetApp/Cisco FlexPod, which the company runs. Cloupia is also easy to get up and running. I want a tool that will allow operators to manage multiple data centers holistically, through a single tool, and deploy infrastructure in a repeatable fashion
Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer, Walz Group
Together with Cloupia, we are uniquely addressing Enterprise challenges by looking at the data center from the business perspective and driving innovation down to and across all components. Cloupia's unified infrastructure controller will give customers an automated, virtualized, cloud-ready and sustainable data center infrastructure and provide the unique advantage of a flexible foundation for long-term growth and sustainability.
Mr. Babji VS, Senior Vice President, Global Head Infrastructure Management Services, 3i Infotech
In a market where Customers are demanding Simplicity, Self service and automation, Cloupia has allowed Empired to deliver our Cloud solution in days rather than weeks. Their level of end-to-end orchestration with infrastructure out of the box is astonishing
Mr Russell Baskerville, Managing Director of Empired Ltd.
None of our competitors have a unified platform equally capable of provisioning every aspect of cloud-based IT from a single interface. Powered by Cloupia's technology, our Virtual Datacenter Controller brings us closer to our vision of providing MSPs with a turnkey, unified cloud-service platform where they can deploy virtual server resources, applications, companies, users and more, all on the fly, all in the cloud, all in matter of minutes
Jacob Kazakevich, OS33 President
We have extensively evaluated cloud management vendors for past six months, Cloupia provides the most advanced cloud platform to build highly scalable and reliable cloud computing environments" said SRA OSS Inc. President, Dr Rao M Papolu. "In addition to providing key cloud management and automation features like policy based adaptive provisioning, self-service portal, infrastructure orchestration, continuous capacity monitoring and single-pane of management, Cloupia is the only platform that offers complete IT stack provisioning solution that allows organizations to automate and manage both physical and virtual infrastructures from a single pane of glass
Dr Rao M Papolu, SRA OSS Inc. President
I was pretty impressed about their dashboard is the powerful set of reporting features which will come handy for enterprises... Their dashboard is one of the comprehensive ones I have seen in the market . Cloupia offers a solution that will help enterprises and service providers get their cloud infrastructure running real fast... I am pretty convinced about the technical capabilities of their platform.
Krishnan Subramanian, Cloud Ave
Gives a birds-eye view and control over everything... a Flex-based UI, which gives it a snappy UI and nice dancing charts, including heat-maps of resource usage
Michael Cote, RedMonk
CUIC has a number of more sophisticated features that a few competitors are currently offering - VI auto discovery, VM storage & Network management and continuous capacity planning
Alessandro Perilli, Cloudcomputing.info
+ more

Why Cloupia? Cloupia Customers Cloupia Products Cloupia Solutions
Unified Cloud Management
Cloud Automation
Cloud Management
Build Internal Clouds
Build Private Clouds
VMware Management
Physical Infrastructure Management
Converged Infrastructure Management
Manage Hybrid Clouds		 Enterprises
Service Providers
Managed Service Providers
Remote Infrastructure Management Providers
 Unified Infrastructure Controller
FlexPod™ Management
FlexPod™ Orchestration
CloudGenie™
Open Automation for Clouds(OAC)		 Multi-hypervisor solution
Multi-cloud Engine
VM lifecycle Management
Self-service Portal
Policy-based Automation
Real-time Performance Management
Real-time Operational Reporting
Dynamic Capacity Management