Netsolus is hoping that cloud management vendor Egenera will help it provision services faster, and in fact hopes to cut the time from days to hours. One ingredient in the Egenera Cloud Suite recipe is self-service that makes it easier for MSPs and their clients to manage applications. Netsolus in now using the Egenera Cloud Suite to support wholesale and retail cloud services.
And because many client requests are now automated Netsolus saves on employee costs and can thus boost profits.
“As the shift to the cloud increases, we’re seeing transitions as service and data center providers become virtual,” said Bryan Ballard, CTO of Netsolus. “We needed the ability to shift from a labor intensive structure to a vending machine approach where customers can self-service their requirements. Egenera Cloud Suite allowed us to not only deliver services quickly and efficiently, but also to enable our clients to design and deploy exactly as they want, when they want and see the results almost instantly ultimately driving higher profit margins.”
Before adopting the Egenera tool, Netsolus did most everything manually. Now the customers, on their own, can do much of this work easily.
“Egenera is continuing to provide management solutions that align with the MSP industry roadmap,” said John Humphreys, VP of sales and marketing of Egenera. “Seeing firsthand the cost savings and high profit margins gained by Netsolus through Egenera Cloud Suite only capitalizes on our promise to deliver best in class cloud management software.”
A Little Egenera Cloud Advice
Another big part of the Egenera business is helping customer migrate to the cloud, and here Egenera CEO Pete Manca, offered a bit of advice in an interview with Enterprise Systems Journal.
The cloud is really a set of services that run on top of virtualized hardware infrastructure. First thing to find out is how your potential service provider’s infrastructure is architected and built. What is the hardware, how it is virtualized, how does it handle spikes and how does it protect itself against crashes? “This infrastructure must be reliable, flexible, and self-healing if the cloud service is to meet service-level expectations,” Manca believes.
There are three issues you should focus on. “Customers should only care about 1) cost of their service and 2) the level of service or performance the system is delivering from the perspective of the end user. In this way, the crucial metrics of cloud are availability, capacity, and response time. When accessing the risks, these three metrics are what is most important to consider when moving to the cloud,” Manca argues.
One of the big impediments to the cloud is the network, egress points in and out of the enterprise net, the wide area with all its hops and bottlenecks, and the egress points in and out of the cloud provider. Manca sees a need and progress. “On the networking side, there is a need for a single, secure network that flows from inside the enterprise and back. AT&T, Verizon, and others are now starting to deliver virtual private networks and physical networks that can directly connect a customer to their clouds so the cloud resources look like an extension of their networks,” he says.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
