White Papers
5 Ways to Maximize Profits for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
Companies are always looking for new streams of revenue, especially those that are already offering online services, IT services or have excess capacity in their virtual datacenter that they want to monetize. The general push in the market to outsource and decrease its datacenter footprint has provided a market opportunity for forward-looking Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and even business units within an organization that want to provide services for other business units. This whitepaper discusses how advances in cloud management software have lowered the barriers of entry for the MSP market.
Continuous Cloud Optimization
While extremely convenient and efficient from a development perspective, virtualization has introduced a resource inefficiency problem from an IT operations point of view. The problem that virtualization has introduced into the data center is that of an uncontrolled proliferation of virtual machines (VMs) both powered up and powered down, snapshots that go back months or years, and over-provisioned machines that lead to wasted resources that could otherwise be deployed to support services that need them. Letting users provision their own services through a cloud management framework only exacerbates the issue. This whitepaper uses the discipline of control systems and applies it to cloud management to achieve greater efficiency within the virtual data center.
The Automation Myth
As the percentage of the virtual datacenter increases, so does its complexity, and automation is the only effective way to deal with this increased complexity and speed. Automating the datacenter has traditionally been complex and time consuming, requiring extensive customization; and the impression is that automating the virtual data center is even more so, taking extensive resources to implement properly.
This heavy resource cost has tended to limit automation to basic scripting for those midsized and larger organizations that do not have access to extensive pools of IT resources, or professional services budgets. Fortunately there is now a viable solution for those types of organizations. Embotics vCommander™ provides out-of-the-box virtualization and private cloud automation specifically aimed at overloaded administration teams, enabling them to add automation to their management mix, without the need for significant implementation, extensive customization efforts or high learning curves.
This white paper looks specifically at the automation capabilities of Embotics vCommander, and takes you through – in detail, exactly what it takes to implement world-class automation in your environment.
The Pragmatic Path to Cloud Management
The concept of the “dynamic data center” or “private cloud” has been around ever since the first data centers were formed. But with the advent of virtualization technology, the concept of “private cloud” has moved beyond the realm of vision and into the realm of possibility; and is frequently discussed as the first step to full (private and public) cloud use.
This whitepaper looks at the natural evolution of virtualization adoption and outlines the most common challenges in building and managing a private cloud. The creation of a cloud will require changes to IT organizations, processes and procedures, in ways that we are not completely sure of yet. It is challenging, but it can be done. “Rip and replace” methodologies won’t work here; this paper outlines a more pragmatic path, one that helps evolve a datacenter from its current use of virtualization towards a true private cloud.
