Abiquo launches new enterprise edition Cloud Management platform

The platform update will allow users to create High Availability virtual appliances, achieve faster set up times, have greater control of storage tiers and improve scalability and performance of their cloud offering. Improvements have also been made to the image lifecycle, self-service features and to accounting systems.

Abiquo has extended its virtual appliance builder to enable users to create High Availability virtual appliances through its self-service interface. A new concept of “application layers” alllow users to define virtual machines within a virtual appliance that must reside on different physical hosts, this ensures true High Availability.

Abiquo’s policy based deployment rules have been extended to ensure that virtual machines in the same application layer are deployed to different hosts. In VMWare environments the anti-affinity rule in Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) will also be set.

Another feature within the latest edition will allow users who are deploying Abiquo for the first time, with a new configuration wizard allowing the Cloud administrator to quickly and easily carry out the initial configuration for their cloud platform, accelerating the time taken to get familiar with the Abiquo technology.

Within the 2.4 edition Abiquo has also enabled Cloud administrators to have greater ability to manage storage tiers by extending its policy based control. Cloud administrators can now determine which Cloud tenants have access to certain storage tiers within a datacentre. For service providers this allows for greater control of the storage based services that may be provided through the Abiquo platforms and for enterprises this allows IT to remain in controls of the storage platforms whilst still offering controlled self-service to the platform users.
Another key feature to the Abiquo 2.4 platform is the new and improved accounting system. Cloud administrators can now extend and consolidate the accounting system and ultimately improve management and control. The extensions include additional resources and custom accounting resources, such as a new range of accounting metrics, different sizes of accounting periods and resource unit granularity. The new changes also allow for greater flexibility in charging for Cloud resources and the ability to easily charge for additional services that may be part of the Cloud platform.