Cloud Cruiser will be launching a hosted service to track use for private, hybrid and public clouds so that IT can accurately calculate chargebacks to each department.
The "pay for what you use"
model may spur cloud adoption among organizations, but IT departments still
have to figure out how to
charge
individual departments for what they use.
Cloud Cruiser announced a
platform on Mar. 1 that collects machine use data about what storage,
networking and cloud applications are being accessed, Dave Zabrowski, CEO and
founder of Cloud Cruiser, told eWEEK. The information is correlated with user
information obtained from LDAP and other user-management systems, he said.
"There's serious money
moving to the cloud," and companies need to be sure about how it's being spent,
Zabrowski said.
The Cloud Cruiser software
would be available as either a hosted service or as an on-premise product that
IT manages internally, Zabrowski said. The company will be announcing a free
"test drive" as a software as a service solution on Mar. 8 and a beta version
of the on-premise software is expected June 1. Cloud Cruiser is targeting Aug.
29 for the official release of the software. Anyone interested in the trial can
channel their organization's real use data through Cloud Cruiser to get a feel
for how it works, Zabrowski said. However, Zabrowski declined to discuss
pricing at this time.
The on-premise solution
would be attractive to users concerned about the volume of data being collected
in the cloud, Zabrowski said.
The software can collect and
correlate cloud use based on IP addresses, which would allow the IT manager to
calculate
costs per data center, Zabrowski said. The dashboard interface allows
managers to define groups based on type of device, business unit, geographic
location or data center. Customers have to enter resource information manually and
set up the hierarchical tree of the organization to track the data by group.
IT managers can also use the
detailed use data to look for ways to cut costs, understand who is using which
services and find instances of usage abuse. The IT administrator can view a
variety of reports that slice and dice the data across multiple metrics, such
as a chart of the Top 10 users of resources by business division. The reports
allow the administrator to drill down in each division to see what individual
employees are using, he said.
With the Cloud Cruiser platform,
companies "know how much a workload costs, and they know at a granular level
who is using that workload, and then they can make decisions to optimize
costs," said Zabrowski.
The information is available
to all levels of the company, according to Zabrowski. A CIO of an organization
could log in and see the information of the entire cloud, with use information
for all services and users. In contrast, a department director would see use
information for only users associated with the business unit. The dashboard can
also provide individual employees with a view of their personal use.
Users often adjust their
behavior when they can see exactly what they are doing, Zabrowski said.
The software is "100
percent" Java, according to Zabrowski, and uses the Spring framework, Google
Web Toolkit and REST APIs. The system uses Jasper Reports for the reporting
component, and stores all the data in a MySQL database, he said.
Cloud Cruise has built hooks
to many existing cloud services, and more are planned, according to Zabrowski.
The LDAP integration allows organizations to set up single-sign-on into the
dashboard, he said.
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