– Garima Thockchom, VP of marketing at Gale Technologies (www.galetechnologies.com), says:

Why is Gale Technologies’ GaleForce Turnkey Cloud useful in today’s enterprise data centers? Why should data center and IT managers care about it? How can they benefit from it?

The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud allows organizations to maximize the resource utilization out of their existing infrastructure by converting static and silo’ed environments into shared, dynamic environments. The GaleForce Turnkey Cloud allows customers to convert their existing IT infrastructure into a private or hybrid cloud environment in just two steps and as little as two weeks.

GaleForce provisions and automates composite resource stacks that consist of bare metal hardware, software and virtual resources, which allows enterprises to run any workload, virtualized or not, in that cloud. Using a solution like GaleForce, organizations can dramatically increase the utilization of their existing resources by up to 85 percent, reduce capital and operational expenditures, and do more with fewer physical, virtual and human resources.

With GaleForce, IT operators are able to set up a cloud, lab, demo, or data center environment in just minutes, providing secure access to resources 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Using GaleForce, operators design rich service and infrastructure templates with drag-and-drop ease and publish them to a custom brandable self-service Web portal catalog. When users of the cloud select the template they want to instantiate from the self-service Web portal catalog, GaleForce provisions all the resources to bring the template to life and allow the workload to run.

Where should composite automation and orchestration rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

Composite automation and orchestration improves resource utilization, making it an important consideration for data center and IT managers that are being forced to achieve more with fewer resources at their disposal. GaleForce builds a cloud out of an environment’s existing resources and automates the entire infrastructure needed to run a workload, unlike the majority of cloud solutions that only provision and orchestrate the software and virtual layers. By using GaleForce, data centers do not have to buy new IT equipment or invest in complex tools in order to build a cloud.

What are the biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to managing resources/building a cloud?

It is challenging enough to manage a slew of disparate resources without having to deal with the additional noise from cloud vendors offering too-complex products that do not provide sufficient capabilities or performance for the average organization, or that lock them into a specific platform that does not integrate with their existing IT infrastructure. Data center and IT managers have been in need of a solution like the GaleForce Turnkey Cloud that gives them a straightforward and fast way to deploy and manage the cloud solution that is built out of their existing infrastructure.

Most cloud solutions today are expensive and complex to deploy, reducing the returns on investment in these tools; or require virtualization technologies that limit the number of workloads that can be run in the cloud.

How can data center and IT managers overcome those challenges?

One key is to implement trusted solutions that simplify the provisioning and orchestration of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which can help companies achieve the difficult balancing act of effectively cutting costs with a shared dynamic environment while continuing to sustain the workload performance one would expect in a dedicated environment. Additionally, they should look for software that will seamlessly integrate with their existing technology and support legacy and heterogeneous environments without requiring the expense and complexity of new hardware and tools.

What advice can you give to IT and data center managers that have a plethora of similar solutions to choose from?

They should carefully examine the available cloud solutions to determine which one will be the best fit for their organization’s needs, depending on the types of workloads they have, the number and type of resources, and so forth.

Some key questions they should ask are:

  • How difficult will it be to deploy the cloud and, once it’s deployed, how many resources will be needed to efficiently manage it?
  • Does this solution provide composite automation of heterogeneous physical and virtual environments?
  • Will it integrate with my existing infrastructure or are new equipment or tool investments required?
  • What types of application workloads can I run in the cloud?
  • Will I be able to accurately schedule and allocate resources and capacity for any given workload?

GaleForce is a real-world cloud computing solution with more than 100 live customer deployments worldwide.