Exploiting users' growing interest in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, Turbonomic has delivered software that manages workloads crisscrossing those environments.
Besides multi-cloud management, Turbonomic version 6.3 boosts performance of cloud-based applications and keeps cloud management costs down by steering inexperienced users away from overprovisioning cloud resources -- something the company claims happens often.
IDC backs up this claim, citing that some 10% to 20% of all cloud spending is wasted because many users don't know the appropriate amount of resources to apply to public, hybrid or private clouds.
"We are entering a decade that will focus on collecting, analyzing and triggering automated actions based on business policies," said Stephen Elliot, a management software and DevOps analyst at IDC. "[Turbonomic 6.3] is one example of software intended to drive better resource decisions."
But equally important for corporate cloud users is having applications perform well and to have them strictly follow policies laid down by IT for things such as high availability and data sovereignty, said Bob Wambach, Turbonomic's vice president of product marketing.
Preparing apps for the cloud
Hiscox, a large insurance company, uses a mix of public cloud and on-premises environments scattered across its U.S. and European markets. It's currently undergoing a major replatforming project in its London location that involves moving a number of mission-critical applications and workloads to Microsoft Azure.
We are entering a decade that will focus on collecting, analyzing and triggering automated actions based on business policies.
Stephen ElliotAnalyst, IDC
The project entails not just moving those applications from on-premises environments but optimizing them for their new environment. The company is using Turbonomic 6.3 to help with this effort.
"We swapped out our core policy system for the U.K. business where around $800 million a year runs through that platform," said Ian Penny, CIO at Hiscox. "Now that system is in full production hosted on Azure."
In addition to putting a cloud system in place that was scalable and cost-effective, Hiscox wanted the ability to quickly spin environments up, test them and then tear them down as needed.
"We need to ensure the performance of the systems is good, that costs are not outlandish and that we are obeying the regulatory rules," Penny said. "All of these applications (like Turbonomic 6.3) are heading in the same direction, adding multisite cloud capability."
Other multi-cloud management software is available from technology providers, including RightScale and BMC Software.
Turbonomic's product serves as a "software management plane," according to Penny, that sits on top of a handful of the company's mission-critical applications spanning the U.S. and European markets. The automation capabilities of version 6.3 have a level of efficiency, speed and cost management IT professionals would have difficulty handling well.
"One of the business objectives is to make use of every IT dollar we spend because it comes right off the bottom line," Penny said. "So if there are hundreds of combinations of decisions with Azure to decide on from a cost perspective, there isn't a human alive who can figure out the optimal choices in real time," he said.
Some of the new multi-cloud management features that assist with appropriately matching workload demand and infrastructure supply include: intelligent cloud auto-scaling for consistent scaling to boost application performance across AWS and Azure and reserved instance enhancements to improve cloud workload performance, as well as to help accurately plan ahead which workloads should tap into reserved capacity.
