Cloupia - Unified Infrastructure Controller

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Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller

The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) is a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud management solution that provides virtual infrastructure control, management and monitoring from a unified dashboard. 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.

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.

Key Capabilities

Unified Interface/dashboard
Self-service portal
Automated policy enforcement
Virtual machine life cycle management
Virtual storage management
Virtual network management
Dynamic resource load balancing
Capacity modeling/mgmt
Capacity on-demand
Chargeback reporting

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
VM life cycle mgmt	Manage entire VM life cycle actions based on policies set by administrators
VM storage mgmt	Discover, monitor, provision & manage virtualized storage
VM network mgmt	Discover, monitor, provision & manage virtual network
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 Mgmt	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 (CUIC) is a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud management solution that provides comprehensive virtual infrastructure control, management and monitoring via unified interface. It provides self-service provisioning, workflow automation, automated policy enforcement and dynamic capacity planning. It reduces VM administration, troubleshooting & provisioning times and improves policy compliance, IT management consistency and resource utilization.

What are CUIC key capabilities?

Unified dashboard to control public clouds & data center infrastructure
Multi-cloud & multi-hypervisor support
Virtual infrastructure auto discovery
Self-service provisioning portal
Provisioning automation
Virtual machine life cycle management
Real time operational reporting & executive reports
Dynamic capacity planning
Automated policy Enforcement & compliance
Track usage and chargeback
Monitoring and Alerts
3rd party integrations- LDAP, IT mgmt tools, Service desk & virtualization platforms

What problems does it solve?

Vendor lock-in with public cloud providers
Multiple interfaces to access and control public & private infrastructure
IT administrative overhead to manage multiple virtual infrastructure
Long lead times & errors associated with provisioning
Visibility into multiple infrastructure resources
Manual & labor-intensive reporting process
Consistent policy enforcement & compliance across the clouds
VM sprawl

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

What cloud vendors are supported?
We support Amazon & Rackspace, but 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.comHypervisor: 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:

Unified controller and dashboard for VM management across private and public clouds
Multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud solution
Self service provisioning portal with fully automated policy enforcement
Advanced analytics for capacity planning, performance management & cost management
Enables ITIL/ITSM best practices implementation and enforcement

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

How does CUIC help enterprises 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

How does CUIC help enterprises build internal private 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 enterprises?
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.

Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller
Product Release Information

Editions	Product Name	Version	Release Date	What’s New
Enterprise Editions	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller - EE	V2.2	8/13/10	CUIC_EE_V2.2.htm
	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller - EE	V2.0	7/04/10
Service Provider Editions	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller – SP	V2.2	8/13/10	CUIC_SP_V2.2.htm
	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller – SP	V2.0	7/04/10
Standard Editions	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller – SE	V2.2	8/13/10	CUIC_SE_V2.2.htm
	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller – SE	V1.8	7/04/10
	Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller – SE	V1.0	5/01/10

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