CloudBolt Brings Self-Service Capabilities to IT Management Platform

Looking to make it simpler for IT organizations to manage complex data center environments, CloudBolt Software today announced it has added self-service capabilities to its IT management platform.

CloudBolt CEO Jon Mittelhauser says the company’s namesake IT management framework is designed to span both legacy and modern IT environments consisting of tens of thousands of servers running on premise or in the cloud. Capabilities of the platform include automated server provisioning and management, unified IT management, chargeback and showback reporting, service catalogs, and license management.

“Our customers have complex headaches,” says Mittelhauser. “We target what we call brownfield environments where there are a lot of legacy servers that need to be managed alongside new ones.”

Rather than replace existing management frameworks, Mittelhauser says, CloudBolt is designed to function as a management overlay IT organizations can use to invoke a variety of other IT management environments, including Chef, Puppet, HP Server Automation, and cloud frameworks, such as VMware, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and Google Compute Engine.

Other new features include service catalog blueprints that can be accessed via the CloudBolt web interface or a REST application programming interface and the ability to create snapshots of virtual machines.

IT administrators can also set rate-based limits and set limits on specific classes of deployments environments along with triggers for turning IT infrastructure on or off, rebooting servers, and the ability to support multiple types of currency units.

IT environments, notes Mittelhuaser, are not only becoming more heterogeneous in terms of the virtual and physical servers they have to support, but also the management frameworks being deployed. Semi-autonomous groups within the IT organization are likely to have embraced multiple management frameworks. CloudBolt provides a mechanism to manage all those frameworks at scale without necessarily requiring every IT team in the organization to standardize on a specific management framework.

Mittelhauser recognizes that it tends to only be the largest of IT organizations that needs to address that level of complexity. But as enterprise IT becomes more distributed in the age of the cloud, the number of IT organizations wrestling with high levels of complexity is steadily increasing.

As the number of business processes that span multiple systems continues to grow and organizations continue to mature in terms of managing IT as true service, interest in more comprehensive approaches to managing IT will undoubtedly increase.