Abiquo's
CEO, Pete Malcolm, and new VP of marketing, Wendy Perilli, introduced
me to the company and demonstrated the company's product. The goal, they
said, was a product that would allow management of physical, virtual
and cloud resources in a highly graphical, policy based, comprehensive
and powerful way.
I think that they have done a good job of meeting their goal.
What Abiquo has to say about its product
Abiquo empowers authorized users and groups, by allowing them to manage their own virtual enterprises within allocated resource limits. New virtual machines or pre-built appliances can be deployed in seconds, dramatically improving efficiency and allowing you to regain business agility. Hypervisor Independence
Abiquo was designed to avoid dependence on any hypervisor. Not only are all major hypervisors fully and simultaneously supported, Abiquo allows conversion of virtual machines from one hypervisor to another in any combination, completely eliminating vendor lock-in with a single drag and drop operation.
Supported hypervisors include:
- VMware ESX and ESXi
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- Citrix XenServer
- Virtual Box
- Xen
- KVM
Global Infrastructure Management
Combines local and remote datacenters as well as hosted resources to create global Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds of unlimited complexity, all managed through a single pane of glass. Multi-tenancy with Delegated Control
Hierarchical user management and role based permissions allow delegation of management tasks according to the organizations needs. Since any user’s view is limited to the hierarchy below them, Abiquo provides multi-tenancy with full isolation, whether to internal groups, or to external customers. A single Web-based management console is context sensitive to the role and permissions of the relevant user, reducing complexity and providing unparalleled ease of use.
Business Policies
Enables the organization to set, edit and manage business policies from a single, centralized policy editor that then completely automates the allocation of virtual resources across the physical infrastructure. Business policies can be set based on security, compliance, energy costs, savings as well as utilization and load balancing.
Autonomous Virtual Enterprises
Empowers users with multi-tenant Virtual Enterprises that allow full control over server, storage and network resources. Each Virtual Enterprise manages its own role-based user group and operates within strictly enforced resource limits. Virtual Enterprise users are fully isolated from physical hardware allowing risk-free, self-service provisioning and management.
Snapshot analysis
It is clear that Albiquo's engineers looked hard and long at management challenges in a multi-tenent or multi-business unit environment and developed a fresh approach to managing systems, applications and the like.
They've come up with a tool that is quite general and will work with most industry standard systems found in today's data centers. The product works with just about anyone's vitual machine software. It also appears that the developers thought about many of the other layers of virtualization technology and provided ways to manage them as well.
The "virtual enterprise" approach was easy to understand and appeared
to be a very powerful abstraction. It allows management of a business
unit's or tenet's resources to be given to a representative of that
organization without allowing those individuals to see or control
anything else.
It appears that Albiquo's designers also thought dealing with the scale of a multi-data center, multi-provider, multi-tenent environment. We're talking about a tool that could easily deal with a huge number of computing resources in a straightforward way.
If your organization is thinking about what it is going to do to manage physical, virtual and cloud resources, Albiquo is a supplier you should meet.