GlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of vendor independent data centre consulting and managed services, today announced its Accelerated Cloud Enablement (ACE) service. Based on GlassHouse’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, this service addresses the escalating market demand for rapidly deployed, secure and manageable private cloud environments that meet defined business objectives.
“For IT organisations, deploying cloud hardware and software is relatively easy, but enabling a true cloud environment that lives up to the promise of defined services, simple user self-selection, and rapid, automated provisioning is much more difficult. It is also part of the reason private clouds have yet to be as widely deployed as predicted,” said Patrick Scannell, President and CEO of GlassHouse Technologies. “IT organisations eager to take advantage of the cost and flexibility benefits of cloud services, and better meet end-user demands typically focus on hardware and software and learn the hard way that success requires much more than deploying technology alone. This service is designed to help enterprises overcome these challenges and ensure that cloud initiatives meet business objectives.”
The ACE service allows enterprises to have a fully-operational private cloud deployed within 45 days. This service is based on DynamicOps’ Cloud Suite, and supports VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. While the ACE service facilitates the rapid deployment of a fully-operational cloud, it is also designed to be fully extensible and scalable.
This service provides dramatic improvements in time-to-cloud-value. While simple hardware and software cloud products can be deployed quickly, a typical enterprise private cloud deployment can take six to 12 months. And without proper planning, service definitions, security and governance requirements, many of these deployments fail to meet objectives. Often the result is increased costs, failure to convince end users to adopt the cloud services and without effective chargeback mechanisms in place, virtual server sprawl escalates. ACE also addresses the common problem of cloud vendors installing their hardware and software and then leaving IT to learn how to manage and integrate users into the cloud environment. ACE ensures that the cloud is designed and deployed to be effective, and also provides the option for GlassHouse to manage the cloud environment for a six-month transition period, or on an ongoing basis. Ongoing ACE management services include cloud-based monitoring, incident management, administration, reporting and defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for availability and provisioning.
GlassHouse’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, also including Cloud Impact Analysis, Cloud Modernisation, and Accelerate cloud services, have experienced tremendous market demand as enterprise IT organisations grapple with the flood of cloud products that promise increased service levels and reduced costs. These GlassHouse services also enable IT organisations to become more of a service provider to end-users, creating on-demand private cloud services while building an agile, easy-to-provision infrastructure in an automated-delivery framework.